This is a dud for all intents and purposes, and yet I can imagine being down voted to hell, all along the way being barraged with a point-by-point breakdown on how I'm wrong on all points with some pseudo-intellectual handwaving. This app is nothing more than popularity-through-absurdity, that it even glazed the eyes of millions is a testament to our culture's obsession with irony, which only further feeds the fuel to the fire. And yet I further this irony by commenting on it as making it something to talk about. It's a vicious cycle.
/rant
That doesn't make it "stupid genius", but for any given tool, someone will find a use for it.
An "app" that sends just "yo" gathered 1.5m????
Yo has exactly the same data model as Facebook pokes (a graph where the vertices are people and the edges are binary signal flags), but is different-looking enough that people are willing to grant it a different semantic interpretation. The semantic people seem to have adopted for a Yo is “hey, do the thing you know I want you to do, now’s the time” — which is, admittedly, a pretty useful semantic that was surprisingly missing from online interaction.
This semantic didn’t have to missing—someone could communicate the same semantic inherent in a Yo over Twitter, or SMS, or really any push-enabled app. But people will only understand services through the lens of one semantic at a time: you can't get someone to use Facebook as Twitter, or Wordpress as Tumblr, or Youtube as Coursera. Because nothing was just for this--nothing had this "rut" of suggested usage burned into its UX--users didn't bother doing this interaction at all. And now they do.
There's probably a market for quite a few other services that have effectively the same data models as apps we already have (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Snapchat, Reddit, etc.) but which use different UX to push users into a new semantic interpretation of those data models. (To get different information from the same data.) HN seems completely color-blind to this idea, interestingly.
> "It's stupid!"
No, it's pretty fun :)
> It's useless! You can't communicate with 0 characters!
There are actually tremendous sources of information with Yos, if you know where to look. Timestamp and username alone are usually enough to convey some message ("Hey it's 8 oclock, log in to Steam dawg", "Hey, it's 2am, why not come over to my place?" etc.). Implicit information like number of Yos exchanged in the last 10 minutes, health of friendship, etc. also contribute. The key thing to keep in mind is that all Yos are ambiguous and depend on context: the detractors should stick to texts, if they don't want to decrypt messages. Either way, there will always be people saying that low entropy signals are useless, but, as they say, 1 if by land, 2 if by sea...
> "Doesn't scale / tech is too basic / I could write it in day / society is crumbling / etc."
C'mon.. The app is a concept piece. What's wrong with the app (barring whatever security issues there once were or that might resurface)? Yo accomplishes it's goal, end of story. These types of critiques all seem rooted in the idea that Yo fails to reach some critical threshold of complexity that would give it intellectual merit or some shit like that. Strawman: "A sham argument set up to be defeated."
And while you're right about metacontextual information being a thing - that problem is not one that Yo actually solves. I don't see anyone saying yos are completely useless, but people have already been exchanging these kinds of messages for decades (they're known as emoticons and emoji.) In that regard the only thing Yo has going for it is it's UI.
Which, granted, may be a draw - but it's still not worth the coverage it's getting.
Also it's worth pointing out that "stupid" and "fun" can be overlapping sets. Case in point: Angry Birds. Clearly fun, also clearly kind of stupid.
I'd also like for readers unfamiliar with 4'33 to read up about it, and what was said about it at the time.
While it pains me to say it, there is case to be made for Yo as a work of art, if art can be accidental (I guess all real memes are accidental art in a way, and Yo's popularity seems memetic to me.) And perhaps the ephemeral nature of the medium works against it, but I seriously doubt anyone is going to care about Yo fifty years from now.
That's neither Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid. That's just handicapping yourself for no reason other than faux-superiority.
You mean like television?
