By: iPadfanzz staff on December 22, 2012
Pokes, once an old and popular Facebook feature which were used to get friends' attention on the site, has now been re-imagined as a mobile app.
The Facebook Poke app allows you to poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what they're up to in a lightweight way. Since the messages sent through the app are self-destructing, each message expires after a specific time you've set, say 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds, and cannot be retrieved by either party again. The app lets you poke an individual friend or several at once.
On using the app, it may remind you of Snapchat app, which self-destructs photos so it's harder for friends to store and embarrass you with later. Facebook’s latest app is also seen as a counter measure of the growing popularity of Snapchat app which is gaining traction with young users. People share nearly 50 million photos on Snapchat every day as against Facebook’s 300 million photos shared a day. Clearly, Facebook didn't want Snapchat to grow so big so that it would have to make another costly acquisition.
Reports on tech blogs suggest that Facebook did show interest in acquiring Snapchat, but but when the founders decided to stay independent, Facebook built its own version in just 12 days.
After you send a poke message, the recipient gets a push notification with a voice saying “Poke!” After opening the app, the user can see the type of message that has been sent until the timer runs out and the message disappears.
Since the app is completely mobile, nothing you do outside the app (say Facebook.com) will be viewable to users inside the app. There’s currently no way to view Poke app messages on the web.
Further, Poke simply links back to the main Facebook terms of service, which means that Facebook can save all the content from the app until you delete your account. But reports suggest that all Poke messages are retained for two days after being read, to help facilitate abuse reporting.
Pokes, once an old and popular Facebook feature which were used to get friends' attention on the site, has now been re-imagined as a mobile app.
The Facebook Poke app allows you to poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what they're up to in a lightweight way. Since the messages sent through the app are self-destructing, each message expires after a specific time you've set, say 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds, and cannot be retrieved by either party again. The app lets you poke an individual friend or several at once.
On using the app, it may remind you of Snapchat app, which self-destructs photos so it's harder for friends to store and embarrass you with later. Facebook’s latest app is also seen as a counter measure of the growing popularity of Snapchat app which is gaining traction with young users. People share nearly 50 million photos on Snapchat every day as against Facebook’s 300 million photos shared a day. Clearly, Facebook didn't want Snapchat to grow so big so that it would have to make another costly acquisition.
Reports on tech blogs suggest that Facebook did show interest in acquiring Snapchat, but but when the founders decided to stay independent, Facebook built its own version in just 12 days.
After you send a poke message, the recipient gets a push notification with a voice saying “Poke!” After opening the app, the user can see the type of message that has been sent until the timer runs out and the message disappears.
Since the app is completely mobile, nothing you do outside the app (say Facebook.com) will be viewable to users inside the app. There’s currently no way to view Poke app messages on the web.
Further, Poke simply links back to the main Facebook terms of service, which means that Facebook can save all the content from the app until you delete your account. But reports suggest that all Poke messages are retained for two days after being read, to help facilitate abuse reporting.
