Mark Zuckerberg owner of Facebook has in a live video launched a new conferencing app called Room. He made this revelation last Friday, It is believed that Room is a competitor of Zoom. Zoom is one of the video conferencing apps that has won the hearts of many during this crisis.
Facebook is well known for its great services it offers people from all walks of life. It’s known for features like Facebook Live. It is making a big push by focusing on millions of people stuck home amid the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Zuckerberg, this is another way Facebook can keep people connected.
The new service called Messenger Room allows users to conference with up to fifty(50) people at a time which is similar to Zoom, Houseparty and other businesses that have seen their businesses boom
For now, users can create Facebook Rooms through News Feed, Groups, and Events Pages, but in the future, the functionality will be expanded to Instagram Direct, WhatsApp, and even Portal, Facebook’s hardware product. The calls will work for you whether you are on the Messenger desktop app, mobile app, or using it in the browser. No downloads will be required to access the calls through a browser. However, people using the Messenger app will be able to use various effects and backgrounds during a video call.
There will be no target ads running on Room
Since this is a Facebook product, the first concern that comes to mind is privacy. Facebook probably understands this well by now and has gone into detail on how they have implemented privacy measures and controls in Rooms. Users can lock Rooms, remove participants, reports and block miscreants, and easily leave a Room too. Facebook also assures that it will not listen to the audio or video calls, whether you use a Facebook account or not. Participant’s Facebook information will not be shared with other participants who they are not friends with on the social network.
Regarding ads, Facebook promises that it will not use any data collected from Rooms to target users for ads, or show ads in the app itself. Data such as device and browser information will be collected for technical improvements. However, it is important to note that calls via Rooms will use video and audio encryption but they will not be end-to-end encrypted for now. It seems to be a challenge to end-to-end encrypt video calls which involve a large group of participants and Facebook says that it is working towards enabling this in the future.
Video conferencing has become a staple for many people stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s how they keep up with work, school, family, friends, and activities.
However, Zoom’s ease of use — initially, users just needed to click a single link to join a meeting – has made the service a target for abuse. In “Zoombombing” attacks, unwanted intruders have disrupted meetings with pornography and racist harassment. Zoom has since taken steps to improve security, including requiring participants to enter passwords by default.
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facebook room video conference service will take advantage of Facebook’s popularity
Facebook has the potential to reach a much broader audience. It says it has seen surging use of its two messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp, with more than 700 million people making voice or video calls every day.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live-streamed announcement on Friday that beyond video conferencing for work, he said, “there are even more social uses of this, just for people to stay connected.”
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Participants can join without downloading an app. It also has elements of the popular video app house party. Facebook users will see notifications at the top of their news feed about new “rooms” their friends have created, so they can “drop-in” as they want.
“I’ve enjoyed testing this,” Zuckerberg said. He described dropping into rooms with his friends as “this neat, serendipitous and spontaneous interaction.”
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