Facebook has unveiled its new chat room app, called Rooms. And it is far more like Reddit or Ning (remember that?) than Whisper or Snapchat.

Rooms is focused on delivering an experience to users that will feel familiar and new, all at once. The app is a chat app, which will bring the old-school, instant messenger, chat rooms back to life.

But don’t get lost in nostalgia just yet as the app is going to be taking on some new life of its own. Right now, the app is only available on iOS, but soon, the app is expected to be making its way over the Android, and that will go over with great excitement.

Rooms is a publishing tool that allows users to create discussion boards on any topic they want, then invite others to join either through private invitations or by posting a public link.

Participants can sign in with any user names they want, and they can change user names from room to room. The app asks for nothing up front other than a user name, although it strongly suggests you provide more as a security measure.

Each phone or tablet is assigned a random number, and the name a person picks for each room is associated with that number. That means other people cannot use the same name — Zuckersaurus, for example — in the same room, although they could use it in other rooms.

The app requests an email address because if you want to sign in from another device or if you ever delete the app, it needs to send a one-time verification QR code for you to use as a password to gain access to all of your usernames and rooms from the new device.

While the premise of anonymity is reminiscent of 'old-school' chat rooms, it's a far cry from the AOL set-up of yore.