Yo, The Revival of The Poke?
Or Possibly a Fad. Time will Tell but it’s Worth Paying Attention.
Pokes were a big deal in high school. I used a poke to subtly tell a crush that I was interested before I could muster up the courage to ask her out. Receiving a poke back made my heart skip a beat. Close friends and I would get into poke wars for no reason. It showed that we were bored and more importantly, in a weird way, that we cared about each other. Over time a poke war would become a battle of determination. There is even a buzzfeed article listing the 21 types of pokes.
When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings. -Facebook FAQs in 2007
The poke feature on Facebook has since been deemphasized. I can’t even find it on the mobile app and I have to click the “…” button on someone’s profile to poke them. I haven’t poked anybody since high school until today. And the only reason that I poked someone today is because I downloaded Yo and wanted to see how poking felt in comparison.
Sending someone a yo (yoing someone?) is a much faster and more fun experience. The word choice is also just better. Yo unbundles the poke feature from facebook and repackages it in a hip, mobile first design. Sending a yo is a one click experience, making it possibly the fastest way to send someone a message, even if it is only one bit of information.
You complain “But I could have built Yo in an afternoon!” But you didn’t. The difficulty in creating an app doesn’t really matter in relation to how much value people get out of it. And right now I know a lot of people who are having fun using yo.
Fad or new phenomena?
That’s the question that I try to answer as an early stage venture investor looking at consumer social companies. It is an especially important question when a company a) catches the flash of lightning growth like Yo has and b) is trying to popularize a new and seemingly frivolous medium of communication.
It is too early to tell if there is lasting value in what Yo has built. A lot will depend on how they execute going forward and how the product will evolve. As well as whether sending yos—or whatever the app evolves into—is a lasting and widespread behavior.
Since the social landscape has matured new entrants have to focus on different mediums and different takes on existing mediums. Yo is trying to own zero character communication. The missed call communication phenomenon is a great analog that points to the potential wide use of an app of this kind (hat tip @pmarca). People call and then hang up to send a message without using up minutes or data. In Bangladesh this makes up to 70% of cellular network traffic and the meaning of missed calls can vary depending on the sender and the situation.
Despite my early excitement, I do not have a clear conclusion. I am just excited to see how Yo progresses and am intrigued by the potential use cases of something as simple of sending a yo. They have already set up an API and have the showcase example of follow WORLDCUP and get a yo whenever a team scores. The tagline of “Yo is a zero character communication tool” hints at a future where yo isn’t the only message you can send but time will tell what product vision the founder has in mind. With any consumer app this early staged it is impossible to fully know what it will turn into. But whenever in the rare case that an app is simultaneously widely mocked and widely used, pay attention.
