On Yo

Just because this is a bubble, doesn’t mean it’s useless

Years ago I wanted someone to make an app. I envisioned it called “hey” and all it would do is say “hey” to someone on your list. Basically exactly what Yo is. But this isn’t a story about how I thought of an idea first, it’s about why I wanted that in the first place.

There are all of the obvious reasons the app is amusing. Sending 100 yos to your best friend immediately on signing up. Trolling someone by interrupting them with a yo string while they are on the phone with their mom. DDOSing someone with yos while they try to add more friends (my friends keep doing this to me.) Yes all of my ideas involve being annoying on the internet, but also all of the ideas the Yo app suggests as well.

Friends have come up with other good use cases. Someone thought it would make a good deadman’s drop, as in, “If you don’t get a Yo from me every day, call the cops.” Another idea is the reverse, if you are worried about alerting your date that you are finding it boring or sketchy, you can quickly send a Yo to a friend to have them to call you and pull the ripcord with a fake emergency, in a way that isn’t immediately recognizable as that behavior.

But back to me because the world revolves around me, k? I wanted this app because I spend a good amount of time dropping off, and then picking up my children from various obligations. I wanted an app where, with one or two taps, I could alert them, or their friends, or other people I was picking up that I had arrived or was about to. Almost every other app requires deep clicking, then adding of text which requires both of my tiny hands. I am not texting while driving, but when pulling over to contact someone to let them know I’ve arrived, I often find myself spending minutes on what should take seconds.

Yes it is based around a super simple, possibly stupid idea. But it’s the way you can use it combined with other forms of communication that makes it worthwhile as a potential tool. Twitter was about just sending a text message to the internet. Facebook was about what you were doing right now. Later they added more features and options, but there are still groups of people that use those platforms solely in the original fashion. I don’t know that it is worth investing 1 million, but I also don’t think this tool should be written off as totally useless just because on its face it seems simplistic.