Facebook Rooms: Bringing QR Codes Back

I was not impressed when I found the new Facebook app, Rooms, on Product Hunt. As we’ve seen before, it looked like Facebook came out with an imitation concept based on other popular apps, in this case Whisper and Reddit.

Rooms is essentially pseudo-anonymous Whisper with Reddit discussion capabilities. Rooms are essentially chat groups formulated around specific topics that you can join. After downloading the app and joining some rooms, I discovered it offered more than what I thought.

In fact, I was engaged in discussions with strangers, and I also invited friends to my room, “Ray’s World.” It’s invigorating to talk about my newly found obsession with bad television with strangers on the internet while still engaging with friends about my other “normal” hobbies.

QR codes? Weren’t those cool in 2008?

One of the biggest surprises to me about Rooms is the use of QR codes to join rooms. QR codes are used to send invitations and to grant access to rooms. This is one of the most unique, and risky, distribution methods I’ve seen.

Coupled with the lack of discoverability, it almost seems crazy that a social conglomerate like Facebook would allow Rooms to go to market with this big disconnect. It took me a while to understand the logic behind this decision, and even now, It’s difficult to say whether it will ultimately work.

Josh Miller, Facebook product manager and the man behind Rooms, explains in a Medium post that Rooms is inspired by the early internet days where discovery wasn’t a concept and you “had to tell Netscape exactly where you wanted to go.”

Similarly, Rooms creates a QR code whenever a new room is started and access is granted only to those who have the QR code. Interestingly enough, within 24 hours, an unofficial hack by the early adopters started collecting the QR codes on Instagram using #Rooms. In addition, Miller discovered that users are posting QR codes in other rooms to help people discover new rooms, similar to how “forums, message boards and blogs use to link to each other.”

The QR codes are working… sort of

A simple search for “#Rooms” on Instagram reveals more than 150,000 photos, but the majority aren’t related to the app.

But there is the Instagram handle, “Facebook Rooms,” that exclusively posts QR codes linking to different topics. Hiten Shah of Hitenism wrote an insightful post on Rooms’ invite system, what he calls a “distribution bet.”

Hiten quotes some of Miller’s tweets on this model, which emphasize sharability, user behavior and user research. All of these are cited reasons on why Miller and the team behind Rooms use QR codes as a method of social distribution.

The mobile environment is heavily saturated, and finding the right channel for distribution is a huge challenge. User acquisition for mobile users has primarily defaulted to ad spends, word of mouth marketing and social engine invites.

It takes a lot of guts to even attempt a new method of acquiring users and using an antiquated system like QR codes. The only positive I see with the invite system is that the functionality and effectiveness does not rely on the need to download a separate QR reader. Rather, it’s built into the on boarding process of the app and allows for Rooms to search through your photo stream or open up your camera.

It’s reasonable to think Facebook would leverage the social sharing power of its 1.3B users to truly propel installs. Instead, Facebook is gambling on this new channel of distribution that many of us (or at least I) think is non-scalable.

This experiment could pave the way for mobile developers to reach outside of the norm and create their own hack on how to best reach their audience.

Facebook Rooms: Bringing QR Codes Back