Much ink has been spilled in the last 72 or so hours about “the latest social app craze”. I’ve seen many profiles describing it, and talking about its success and its creator, but few trying to look past the success into the causes or logic, if any, behind it. Figure I’ll take a swing.

For those of you who don’t keep up with the tech press or regularly look at app store top 10s, and happened to miss Thursday evening’s Colbert Report, “Yo” is a smartphone app of exceedingly simple premise and mechanics—you have a friend list and when you tap on a friend, they receive a push notification with “From [your username]”. By virtue of notifications’ designs on both major platforms encompassing app name prominently in the notification, the implication is that one “says Yo” to another. If one keeps one’s phone unmuted, this is reinforced by the apropos custom notification noise.

To the surprise of… well, roughly everyone… this week, almost 3 months after the app’s nondescript launch, the app has exploded in popularity seeing an installed base of some 200,000 users and a venture investment of $1 million. I have found myself in many conversations about it in the last few days. Probably more than regarding any other recently launched app.

While some are content to smile and nod, the question on most people’s lips is pretty simple: “why?”

In this piece I wish to spell out my own collected (too many) thoughts on the matter. I have at least three theories I will lay out. (Despite having seen a headline, I choose to deliberately undertake this discussion without first reading today’s Business Insider piece. So please excuse any duplication with or failure to account for that.)

“Yo” as satire and participatory art

This seems to essentially be the prevailing theory: Yo, which the creator has wrapped in a possibly tounge-in-cheek exuberant marketing pitch, but admits took him about 8 hours of implementation work, is a deliberate social satire / performance art piece, which journalists are covering and everyday people are adopting in (more than) half-ironic acquiescence to their roles in the drama being played out on national scale. In essence, an Onion article writ large on the world-wide stage and played for laughs.

Certainly there is some amount of credence to this interpretation. The app’s developer API and exuberant job listing announcements speak to a deliberate satire of the silicon valley “second tech bubble” startup culture. Rumors suggest the VC funding came down from a pre-existing friend of the creator and that the $1M “investment”, legally real though it is, may have been basically earmarked for “viral marketing” for the firm. And regardless of the intentions of creator and backer, it is undeniable that in playing down bafflement and telling friends here and there, the populous at large has been working at least partially under this assumption.

Stepping thus outside the realm of intention and putting on the hat somewhere between literary critic and “found art” critic, I wish to highlight a few features and experiences of “Yo” that speak to me in providing commentary on the status quo:

Yo as commentary on the third-wave social network

Yo, following in the footsteps of Snapchat and Facefeed among others, eschews many of the defining features of what has recently come to be seen as a “legitimate” social networking experience. So to it adopts the affectations of these counter-mainstream services.

Lightest-weight authentication / the return to pseudonymity
Flouting the increasingly commonplace strategy of outsourcing authentication to a third-party single-sign-on solution, Yo handles its own registration and login. Whereas more and more apps rely on the ease of use and externalization of concerns that is signing up “with Facebook”, “with Google”, “with Twitter”, Yo returns us to the recently bygone era of independent, service-specific usernames. In righteous opposition to the dominance and info-monopoly, you sign up with a username — and that’s all. You don’t even (indeed cannot) provide a password. Identity is established in username alone. Though the inability to reauthenticate is an impractical extreme, this trend at large is in concert with both Snapchat and Facefeed (and others). So to does it even forgo plugging into the existing social graphs of Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn for finding friends — like Snapchat, it choses instead to layer itself on top of the much older notion of “friendship” or “connection” that is mere possession of a phone number. (The latter might also be a shrewd business decision, more on that below).

Ephemerality and needless score-keeping
Yo also shares in common with its new-school social brethren its disdain for an accumulated record of activity. Whereas Twitter and Facebook center around building a shared, often public discourse and history, newer apps have taken a bent towards a “one-and-done” philosophy that sees things here today, gone tomorrow (or more often in seconds flat). While I have easily understood how this aspect is appealing to the backers (not having to work to retain user data), it has not been obvious to me what value is delivered to the user (outside of the much touted “sexting” use case). In my recent explorations with Snapchat, I am sort of getting the gist: basically a freedom from over-composition and over-analysis — an enhance level of casualness from the lack of permanence, I suppose.

Regardless I think Yo plays into this. By virtue of content-free messaging, it presupposes ephemerality. In some ways, it actually goes further than the forerunners, not even having like Snapchat an internal record that messages occurred (without saving content). Yo does reorder your list of contacts to have most recently yo-ed first, but given the ease of the action, and propensity of many users to ping several contacts quickly, this reordering is almost itself ironic in presentation. (Yos are simultaneously arguably not ephemeral at all as they are captured in the notification record, which, being the concern of the system OS, cannot be controlled or cleared by the app itself).

An especial indicator to me of the intentionality of the commentary on these apps is the needless score-keeping. In the “settings menu” of Yo there is a count of th Yo’s you have received. This mirrors an unevenly used feature in Snapchat and Facefeed that I hear is very popular with some teenagers:

These scores serve to provide some measure of “gamification” and make what is supposed to be a very casual and collaborative experience ever-so-slightly competitive. They also are decididely permanent and accumulative elements in an experience that is otherwise dedicated to ephemerality and transience. I think they speak of an interesting insight into human nature.

Sharing?
This one may be a bit of a stretch: but, in what is really an otherwise pretty well-designed app (see next paragraph), there is one glaring “error” of affordance. Though it is not the only one that does so, in iOS7 world at least, the icon with a box and an up arrow means “share”. And that icon is prominently displayed in Yos main interface, but it instead summons the auxiliary menu. “Proper” iOS design would suggest this button should be a gear or so instead. But here I read two things: 1. clicking that button does “pull-up” the auxiliary menu “card” from below the frame of the app — and in this way the icon selection may slightly lampoon the icon itself, 2. there are options on this menu to find friends and invite friends; since there is no actual utility(?) in sharing a particular yo, this is the closest thing to sharing the app has to offer: thus the icon prompts you to “share the experience”, even as it fails to follow the rules about indicating sharing content.

Yo as commentary on the primacy of UX

Yo is an attractive and useable app. It has pretty colors and its pretty straightforward to use by virtue of its simplicity. These are attractive and ultimately very important features for any product of human engineering. I have spoken in many conversations about the primal importance of user experience — I have frequently made the claim that an app brilliantly designed and implemented with breathtaking functionality may be totally obscured and undermined by an unusable frontend. Indeed an app may even be well-designed from a usability standpoint and simply be ugly and still suffer substantially. Yo speaks to the antithesis of this — that a sufficiently well designed app apparently may find success, even if it is nearly useless.

Yo as commentary on the push notification

If you are an avid smartphone user and you install Yo on your phone, you may eventually have the following unnerving experience: you will get Yo’d, you will pull your phone out and near-instinctively swipe upon the resulting notification, and Yo will open.

And Yo will look like Yo always looks.

And you might feel a little disoriented. You will have found that you were interrupted by a message and attempted to seek further context, but there was no further offered context. You might then pause to reflect, “why did I swipe that?”. Well, that’s what you do with notifications — you tap or swipe them—that’s why they’re there, right? …But that was the whole message. Why didn’t you just look at it and dismiss it?… habit mostly.

Man… you really let your phone determine your actions pretty impulsively, don’t you?

“Yo”s potential as underhanded business venture

If I may be allowed to slip off my critic hat and put on my cynic hat, it is interesting to imagine what Yo’s explosion in popularity may have allowed the creator and his friends to do. In particular there are three important points:

1. In using the “Find Friends” feature, many people have, to an unknown party, given and verified their phone number to an unknown third party. They also have, unverified, given their address book to that party!
2. People have not only installed the app, but granted it permission to use push notifications.
3. Lots of people have installed this app on their phone already. Most of those people have their phones set to autoupdate their apps.

Thus, “Yo” may be basically a trojan.

It could be a fairly effective information harvesting scheme for selling phone numbers to telemarketers, spammers, phishers, etc. It also could be used to directly spam people with arbitrary information. For now notifications just say Yo and a name. But they are driven by a generic external process and can be made to say anything. For example, many Yo users received a oddly contentful Yo notification telling them that they can get Yos for every world cup goal. This was not written into the software — its easy to send any text to any or all users. Indeed some third party hackers already have determined that they can send arbitrary text as a notification to any user’s phone. Given above discussion about the impulsive way many people respond to notifications, the opportunities for paid promotion or even fraud are rife here!

A perhaps more interesting possibility, though one largely allayed by the “walled garden” nature of both the App Store and Google Play, is that through auto-update, Yo could simply transmute into anything else. This could be something nefarious, but it could also just be any upstart app of any kind. It is a huge boon to app makers’ usage when they can make deals with manufacturers or telecoms to get their apps pre-installed on phones. Yo has been installed on 200k+ phones, and may well soon be forgotten and gather e-dust on those phones. If it were to suddenly change name, icon, and functionality — it would still be pre-installed on all those phones! (Again: Its an interesting scheme, but realistically Apple and Google probably wouldn’t let it happen … but only probably).