Last week, the Tech Blog of Financial Time discussed about a
brand-new app, Yo. An article by Judd Legum at Think Progress also narrated how
the App got a $1 million funding. It
only took 8 hours to build the app, and the only thing it does is allow you to
send the word ‘Yo’ to your friends. To many, it seems like a joke. But its
inventor, or Arbel, is totally serious.
Yo is a very simple app. It allows you to send a push
notification to anyone else with the app. All of those notifications say the
same thing: “Yo.” The entirety of the app is a list of friends’ usernames, one
tap of which sends them a “Yo”, which arrives with a cheeky intonation of the
colloquial greeting and the name of the sender. Arbel, who built the app three
months ago, has quit his job and moved halfway around the world — from his
native Israel to San Francisco — to work on Yo full time. According to Arbel,
once you start using Yo “the way it affects your life is profound.” He noted
that many of the reviews of Yo in the app store say things like “Yo changed my
life.” Each Yo can mean whatever you want it to mean – or have agreed
beforehand with your friend. Ultra-simplicity brings wide-open scope for
personal interpretation.
Arbel plans to build a Yo button for bloggers, to alert
followers when they post, or allow brands to send out Yos when they are running
sales. “We are playing with a lot of ideas,” he says – but none that will add
complexity to the app. “You need to have just one thing. It has to be only yo.”
The past week has seen one interesting example: add the user WORLDCUP and it
will send a Yo whenever a team scores in the football championship. It doesn’t
give the score or the team, of course, but it’s an alert to look up at the
nearest screen to see the replay. Thus far, it has attracted over 50,000 users
who have sent about 4 million Yos.
“It’s not just an app that says Yo,” says Mr Arbel. “It’s a
whole new means of communication.”
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