23 ms·
Yo
- ethana 12y agoI don't know why I'm having a crack out of this. It's just so silly.
- hakcermani 12y agoYo :-)
- aashishkoirala 12y agoWhat this is, I believe, is a tell-tale sign of the second bubble.
- rlu 12y agoI just...what? I don't understand. It's basically begging for you to switch apps after you get the "Yo" push notification. I can't really imagine a conversation which goes like this: Me: Yo Them: Yo Me: Yo Them: Yo ... What I can imagine is getting a Yo from someone, switching apps, and being like "what's up? [p.s. dont fucking Yo me anymore. Just message me using a real app.]". That "wut" app is similar in that you can't have a real conversation with anyone in particular, but it can at least be used for sharing secrets or something. I guess. Yo doesn't have such a use case that I can see. They could maybe pivot it to act like tinder where if both of the parties yo eachother then it goes to a separate section of the app where they can actually IM eachother. But...idk. That doesn't seem particularly interesting/differentiating either. I must be naive/short sighted.
- esrauch 12y agoA very large amount of my phone messages are actually null-content messages: my phone is very often a "I'm here" when picking someone up, or "let me in" or "done shopping, waiting for you" if I'm grocery shopping with someone. Basically any time someone says "message me when..." there is no conversation when I message them. There is just a contentless phone call or text message. This is filling a communication niche that isn't well supported by the existing methods. That said, I'm still not willing to install a new app just for that, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there.
- rlu 12y agoThat's fair. I think you did just find a use case for it? But I think the very fact that you won't install an app just for that (rightfully so in my opinion!) by definition means there is no value there.
- esrauch 12y agoI don't think it is fair to say anything I won't install has no value, I won't install WhatsApp or Snapchat either. Pretty much 0% of all apps that have enough value to raise $1m seed funding provide enough value for me to install them.
- qq66 12y agoThe existing method, of course, is a standard SMS message that says "Yo". I've sent plenty of them.
- hayksaakian 12y agopresumably the value of the OP is that it reduces that friction of opening your SMS app and typing "Yo"
- qq66 12y agoGiven that a "Yo" usually follows a more detailed text message like "Text me when you're downstairs," I think the total finger-on-screen time would be higher to open the Yo app and search for the right contact. I assume that Yo has another plan that they haven't gone public with yet, since "Company that just says Yo raises $1m" is more newsworthy than "Company to solve problem X raises $1m." They'll get people to download the app and then add the new functionality with an automatic update.
- disillusioned 12y agoBecause the app magically sends the Yos without having to be launched? Facebook messenger has the thumbs up as a single press, as the send button turns into that with null content.
- notduncansmith 12y agoI could see the Tinder-style pivot actually making this an interesting app. As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication. If I message a friend on Skype, I know that we're most likely going to converse over Skype. Same with email, SMS, phone call, etc. With Yo, however, they have to choose some method of communication which may not be ideal for me. Furthermore, given that there is zero metadata regarding the "Yo", they have no clue how urgent it is that they get in touch over some real communication channel. The only context that one can have around a Yo would have to be established before-hand (over a medium for real communication). In fact, since there's no metadata (besides the identity of the sender), Yo is actually less useful than a beeper.
- astrocat 12y ago>As it stands, what this app fails to do is establish a channel of communication. This might be the allure. Its a message without baggage. There's no guilt for failing to say "hey, how are you man?" No shame in saying "yo" and getting on with your life. Because it lacks the ability to "establish a channel of communication," it inherently removes social pressures to extend the communication to a degree one or both parties may not want at the moment.
- notduncansmith 12y agoThat's an interesting theory, and something like that could have a place somewhere. It's unfortunate that one has to establish the grounds for such a relationship beforehand, by convincing someone to download this app that allows pinging between them and exactly one other person (until this app gets more traction).
- sytelus 12y agoHave you ever seen late night TV ads for a golf club that allows you to piss in it? I never understood Instagram and Snapchat and the likes. I don't use it and I find it's ridiculous that there people who use it. But apparently there is whole mass of 17 yrs olds who live on this crap. It's similar to whole mass of 65 years old craving for pissable golf clubs. These kind of things either will inspire you to make more things like that or just brush them off as side effect of huge human population where even 0.01% of market is pretty big number.
- jasonwilk 12y agoI just Yo'd about 15 times back and forth with a friend. He just texted me "What's Up" Mission accomplished I guess?
- olympian 12y agoEverybody is laughing now but soon they launch: Yo, buy this! Yo, emoji pack, Yo, plus! Yo, for enterprise. Then suddenly their the next whatsapp.
- DonHopkins 12y ago"Yo Glass!" + "Gee, Yo Location" = "Yobiquitous Computing"
- jmduke 12y agoIt's Facebook's "poke" feature (which I honestly love) in 2014. There's nothing wrong with it, but I struggle to find anything novel about it.
- rhizome 12y agoThe innovation, such as it is, is to get a zillion people to install an app that gives the company a direct line into your notification bar. Think they'll never put an ad there?
- kunaalarya 12y agowell they're not allowed on iOS so no
- nextweek2 12y agoPoke is for attention whores. Excuse my slang. If you have something to say then say it. Otherwise what's your need to get someone else to initiate conversation?
- fmendez 12y agoI'm not what's more disturbing. The fact that it secured 1.2M or the mental gymnastics that people are doing to justify the existence of this app.
- fizwhiz 12y agoThis.
- prawn 12y agoNot sure if this is a typical forum comment or an observation on the meaning that can be given with a single word.
- qu4z-2 12y agothe meaning that can be given with a single word. Very little in this case. There's a reason simple "This" comments are discouraged on HN. Having said that, I do agree that single words can contain a lot of meaning at times. This just ... isn't a great example.
- notwedtm 12y agoAgreed.
- prawn 12y agoTens of thousands of people are finding some use for it, even if it's just novelty. I could imagine yo'ing my wife to say "Thinking of you" while at work, or my brother to say "Not up to much if you want to Skype", etc. I think they could easily start with something curious like this and then slowly extend it to something else (e.g., single word/term conversation elements where you get more choices the deeper the conversation goes). How many naysayers were there (and still!) with something like Twitter? Yet I use Twitter many times each day.
- notwedtm 12y agoYep.
- jacquesm 12y ago> Without ever having officially launched, co-founder and CEO Or Arbel managed to secure $1.2 million in funding from a list of unnamed investors, except for co-founder, angel, and Mobli CEO Moshe Hogeg, who participated in the round. Stuff like that really gets me. I see tons of start-ups that would have a fighting chance given that sort of investment and then lame stuff like this gets funding. Of course they're entirely free to spend their money any way they want, but was there really no place to spend that better? Congratulations to the Yo team for furthering the research to the origins of the term 'dumb money'. I guess if you timed it right you could use Yo to communicate in Morse, but that seems to be a waste of bits considering that each packet will activate a very large number of bits being sent where one would suffice.
- ISL 12y ago1-bit communication can get a lot done. Not sure? (don't do this) Try calling your local emergency service (911 in the US) and hanging up.
- jacquesm 12y agoNo, really don't do this, you could get someone killed like that (priority traffic causes tons of traffic accidents annually, if they follow up on a 9/11 when there is nothing wrong you are in very hot water, and rightly so). There are a lot of situations where one bit communications can make big changes. Sending a voltage down the wire to the 'launch' relay on some missile will do a lot worse. In the end, any actuator anywhere is going to respond to just a single bit changing state. So we're in violent agreement about that. But to reduce the available bandwidth to nothing when lots is available has me puzzled. Twitter found that reducing the number of characters (by necessity, rather than by choice) launched a new medium. I can see how taking that to its logical conclusion (from 840 bits to 1 bit) may create an entirely new mode of expression. At the same time I fear it will not leave them with a value that is is 1/840th of twitter, that '1' is perilously close to a '0'. In that sense it is like 'pair', which tries (tried?) to be a social network for 2. Maybe someone should come up with a 0 bit medium?
- 12y ago
- jordanthoms 12y agoWAT?
- notduncansmith 12y agoThe onboarding process was really jarring. I expected to be able to use it instantly. Instead, I had to wait ~30 seconds while my username was registered, and now I'm sitting on my hands waiting for some SMS with a code that will allow me to login. Also, there's no easy way for me to use the app with other people without inviting them first (which, given my circle of friends and family, would have to be preceded by a sales pitch on why they should download this stupid thing in the first place). As an app that prioritizes ease-of-use and fast communication, Yo really falls flat on it's face. I'm not going to comment on the potential usefulness of this app, because I'm sure others will and I don't think it'll yield any particularly interesting discussion. References will be made to Snapchat and WhatsApp, the word "bubble" might come up, etc.
- fastest963 12y agoThat's weird I didn't have to do an SMS code on Android.
- superuser2 12y agoYou presumably gave the app permission to (among other things) read all of your texts when you installed it. iOS's sandboxing mechanism doesn't expose text messages to third-party apps.
- fastest963 12y agoIt doesn't have that permission on Android to read texts.
- kunaalarya 12y agoThe SMS piece is a server issue with all the traffic they had today. It should be instant but it's been delayed all day for people, was fine when I first signed up. Once it does, your phone number will be verified and it'll connect people in your phone book like Snapchat, Whatsapp, Secret, etc.
- free2rhyme214 12y agoThe co-founder of Yo could sell ice to Eskimos. That's my kind of sales guy on my team.
- melvinmt 12y ago1693 words about an app that doesn't say much.
- reamsofgleam 12y agoTechnology has a tendency to distill everything to its essence. This is just another step towards a world in which the number one film in the country is called "Ass" [1]. I'm 50/50 on this happening within a decade. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
- Mz 12y agoExcerpt: “It’s really lightweight,” said Arbel. “You don’t have anything to open. The Yo is everything, it’s all there is. You don’t have a badge you need to remove or any hidden content. Just a Yo.” Words fail me.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rmrfrmrf 12y agoYo is already used by Yeoman, though...
- stu_k 12y agoI'm hoping that this app and the investment are really some kind of performance art project.
- minimaxir 12y agoNew startup idea: an app that only lets you say "hey" to people. It's called Navi. I can't wait until the hackathons where everyone makes Yo clones unironically. It's going to create an innovation black hole.
- eric_bullington 12y ago>New startup idea: an app that only lets you say "hey" to people. "It's like Yo, only with 'Hey' instead of 'Yo'"
- afriend4lyfe 12y agoIt's "Yo" for "Hey"
- DonHopkins 12y agoScott Brown would have something to say about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNkMwnsWdjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNkMwnsWdjc
- javajosh 12y agoFacebook renames poke->yo, and eats their lunch.
- natural219 12y agoPlease, please, please somebody buy this company for $10 million. This is the best chance in human history to bring Poe's Law to its absurdist conclusion.
- pingburg 12y agoI think your shooting too low. Million is so 2013. $10 Billion minimum!
- relampago 12y agoA harbinger of a tech bubble?
- InclinedPlane 12y agoWhether intentional or not this is essentially the "Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" of app development.
- rhizome 12y agoThe Sokal App-fair.
- pavlov 12y agoOne of the author's jibes at Facebook is that it "causes depression among its users". But what about TechCrunch itself? I would bet money that there's a correlation between TC readership and depression. Reading about pointless apps is a waste of anyone's time and will make you feel worse in the long run.
- ashrust 12y agoIn Europe and a lot of developing countries, where missed calls aren't charged for - this kind of 'nudge' communication is pretty common. I have no idea if it'll work in the US but it's certainly valuable when both parties already have known context, e.g. 'I'll missed call you when I'm outside'
- fiatjaf 12y agoOrtega y Gasset was right.
- brk 12y agoThis just needs 1 more feature: the ability to reply "lo".
- dep_b 12y agoWhat sparked my interest is that indeed there seem to be some words that are like a swiss army knife in possibilities. Yo is a prime example. It can mean hi, okay, no thanks, what's that, hey, a warning and the list goes on forever. Trying the app it said to me that I could connect to Facebook through my settings. The app didn't have settings. sad trombone Don't snort the 1.2 million at once, yo.
- increment_i 12y agoI'm actually kind of surprised at the large numbers of HNers running to defend this thing, and those that expressed the equally valid opinion that this app is garbage have been downvoted into oblivion. In this thread I've seen lines like: "Filling a communication niche", "It reduces that friction of opening your SMS app and typing 'Yo'" What a surreal thread. It literally could have come straight from a script from HBO's 'Silicon Valley'.
- aswanson 12y agoYeah, hilarious. Shit like this makes me wonder if we have reached "peak human" on this planet. Even raising a hint of suspicion at an obviously idiotic allocation of capital is regarded as "hating" or "not getting it". I can imagine aliens watching the spectacle of our civilization from beyond our view and wondering how we justify allocating 10x the NIH cancer research budget to stuff like whatsapp, snapchat, etc and having biochem/physics phds having better job prospects driving for Uber rather than advancing science.
- nijiko 12y agoYo
- cwhy 12y agoYooooooooo If you know what I mean...
- shekhar101 12y agoBy far, this is the dumbest article I came across. Couldn't read it after first few lines. But god! This was huge article on an app that sends two words! :D Hah! Although comments on the article tickled me a bit.
- edanm 12y agoRidiculous as this sounds, there's a very interesting conversation happening on Twitter with Marc Andreessen about this apps' uses. Apparently, the "missed call" phenomenon, where people will call someone else and hang up, is incredibly popular, especially in other countries (e.g. Bangladesh). It's a free way to communicate 1 bit of information, which in many cases is enough if the people know beforehand what they want to communicate. E.g., "come downstairs", "call me back on another line", etc. I think one article mentioned that missed calls are 70% of the traffic of cellular operators in Bangladesh!
- axisK 12y agoWhen I was in high school our local mobile networks brought out a feature called "Please call me" in which you used USSD to send an unbilled notification for another number to call you - you only got around 20 per day but that was more than enough. Most people seemed to use it to notify their parents that they were ready to be picked up from a prearranged place much like you're describing with missed calls.
- clintonb 12y agoThe "missed call" is not a phenomenon. Most cell phone callers (not the receivers) in the developing world are charged by the minute for each call. Hanging up before the call is answered incurs no fee. This is simply a way to save money. Yo is ridiculous and doesn't necessarily solve any problem that is not solved with existing messaging apps.
- prezjordan 12y agoSeeing all these deep critiques/breakdowns of this product makes me feel like I'm in 10th grade english class again.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoThey should've got to Aaron Paul before Microsoft did