Facebook released Rooms, the latest standalone app developed by its Creative Labs team, which enables users to join and create virtual locations that represent their interests.

Users can invite others to the different ‘rooms’ to discover new things about particular interests by sharing photos, videos and text, in a similar way to Facebook or Instagram feeds.

Early room topics include favourite book quotes, street art, parkour, beat boxing and home-cooked meals.

Users have the option to use different identities if they want to contribute to rooms but don’t want friends to know. It’s possible to have different identities, such as nicknames, for different contexts.

In addition to deciding what subject areas rooms cover, their creators can also control other things about them, including font, the emoji by the ‘like’ button, cover photo and colours.

They can also customise pinned messages, member permissions and set whether people can link to content on the web. More customisable features are promised for the future.

The app, which is currently only available to iOS users, was apparently inspired by the early days of the web in which communities, such as forums, message boards and chatrooms, where like-minded people could meet online.

Creative Labs was set up to develop more standalone mobile services offered by Facebook. The first app to emerge was Paper, which allows users to “explore and share stories from friends and the world around you” with sections for photos, videos, and longer written posts.

In June the second standalone title was launched — a photo and video messaging app called Slingshot. Users can send pictures or videos to one or more people but recipients of content must respond with a comment, image or video of their own in order to view what has been sent to them.

A Facebook account is not needed to use Slingshot, as users can connect to friends via their phone number. They can also use the Facebook contacts list to connect.

Facebook’s photo-sharing service Instagram has also launched standalone apps, the latest being the time lapse video app Hyperlapse, which was released in August.