High-res
Facebook’s Snapchat competitor is called “Poke,” confirming what we already knew: The word “Poke” is innuendo for sexy time.
Fascinating just how close to Snapchat it actually is.
There’s no question that the UI/UX is better here, but I’m not sure how much that will actually matter with the teenage Snapchat demographic. Many teens seem to use apps that look and may even perform awful, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the graph — that their friends are using it.
And you might think, “but everyone is on Facebook” — sure, but that also doesn’t matter if the use case is different. Maybe teens are using Snapchat specifically because it’s not Facebook.
Anyway, I’m not going to pretend to really understand Snapchat anyway. Compelling social, fun idea (the self-destructing message) — but high potential to be faddish. But I’m sure I’m missing something.
I’m more interested here in Facebook’s continued march to make stand-alone apps. This seems like it should be a part of the Messenger app, but it’s not. And the deep iOS integration makes this approach really shine (“Sign in as MG Siegler?”).
I also can’t help but wonder if maybe this is a message from Facebook: don’t want to come work with us? Fine, we’ll clone your service in a couple weeks and ship it to a billion users.
At the very least, Poke is a fun attempt to make use of an old part of Facebook in a way that actually makes some sense in the modern, mobile world.
