We all knew Zoom wouldn’t enjoy this level of attention for long before the four horses of tech galloped in to grab their share of the action.

Late last week, Facebook introduced Messenger Rooms in a company blog post.  Facebook never mentions Zoom. But it’s clear that Rooms is its answer to Zoom, which has practically achieved common noun status (a la Kleenex) in the Covid era.

“Lately, Facebook has felt the demand for real-time video,” the company says in the post.

No kidding.

While Zoom is having a moment, it’s not an entirely peaceful one. The company has bent under the strain of tremendous growth in usage (from 10 million to 300 million daily users). And it has faced scrutiny over its security, with mounting stories about susceptibility to spying and meetings getting “Zoom bombed.” While that sounds kinda fun, it apparently isn’t.

In response, last week, Zoom announced major security enhancements would be included in its latest version. Zoom’s action on security is expected to calm investors, who were becoming unnerved by the bad press.

Enter Messenger Rooms

Messenger Rooms is not a new app, but rather a new feature within Messenger that allows video meetings of up to 50 participants. Importantly, they do not need to be Facebook users.

Here is how Facebook describes it in last week’s post.

“Messenger Rooms make it easy to spend quality time with friends, loved ones, and people who share your interests. Create a room right from Messenger or Facebook, and invite anyone to join your video call, even if they don’t have a Facebook account. Rooms will soon hold up to 50 people with no time limit.”

The “no time limit” piece is important. Users of Zoom’s free version have no doubt experienced the awkwardness of having a meeting cut out after 40 minutes. Also key is the ability to join without any additional downloads.

Facebook appears to be going mostly after the non-business users who have flocked to Zoom to host the virtual dates, seder dinners, performances, birthday parties, and so on. Zoom has become almost as famous for these social events as it is for pants-optional business meetings.

Host celebrations, gather a book club or just hang out on the couch with friends. You don’t need to call someone and hope it’s a good time or check everyone’s calendar first. You can start and share rooms on Facebook through News Feed, Groups and Events, so it’s easy for people to drop by. Soon we’ll add ways to create rooms from Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal, too.

The calendar reference may have been another subtle dig at Zoom.

A No Zoombombing Zone

Facebook seems to be capitalizing on Zoom’s security challenges with upfront communication on this issue with Rooms. The company devoted a separate post to its privacy, safety, and security policies.

Here are some of Facebook’s privacy, safety, and security commitments for Rooms:

• “Regardless of whether you use Rooms through your Facebook account or join as a guest, we don’t watch or listen to your audio or video calls.”
• “As with other Messenger features though, audio and video from Rooms won’t be used to inform ads. And, we don’t show ads in Rooms.”
• “When you join a room through Facebook or Messenger, call participants who you aren’t friends with on Facebook will be able to see and hear whatever you say or share in the room, but they won’t gain any greater access to your profile or information in other parts of Facebook. “

Facebook doesn’t promise the end-to-end encryption of video content. “While there are significant challenges to providing end-to-end encryption for video calling with large groups of people, we’re actively working toward this for Messenger and Rooms,” the company said in the post.

It’s an open question whether Rooms will gain popularity among B2B users frustrated with Zoom’s limitations. We can certainly see some work teams using it. However, Facebook’s messaging around Rooms makes it clear that it sees this as an opportunity to cut into Zoom’s sudden popularity as a social platform.

Update: Google Makes Meet Video Conferencing Free

Since we originally published this post on April 28, Google has come in with its own move to capture some of Zoom’s mojo. Google has announced that Meet users can now host free videoconferences on the platform.