Facebook Poke

» see facebook.com/poke as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i was on android in '12 and ankara at the time, so the poke app showed up in my world as a techcrunch headline and not as an icon i ever installed. for some reason that was true for most of facebook's ios-only experiments. snapchat had not arrived in turkey at any meaningful scale either. the people i knew who took disappearing photos took them on whatsapp and trusted the recipient to delete.

facebook shipped poke on december 21 '12 after a reported 12-day sprint led by blake ross. the build had been ordered by mark zuckerberg himself after snapchat's founders refused to sell. the app was a deliberate snapchat reimplementation. it had timed photos and timed videos with the same disappearing-text idea bolted on top. the timer choices were 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. you poked someone in the social meaning of the word and the content went away after they viewed it.

the launch hit number one in the us app store free chart on the back of facebook's distribution muscle. the rank held for a few hours. then it dropped to the second page by new year. by mid january '13 it was outside the top 100. snapchat itself stayed above it for the whole life of the app.

zuckerberg told the press in '14 that poke had been more of a joke than a product. that quote read as damage control at the time. facebook removed both poke and the standalone facebook camera app from the app store on may 9 '14, the same day, without much of a goodbye notice. the official statement said the company was focusing on instagram for those use cases. instagram had already been a facebook property since '12, the merger of the two product strategies happened the moment poke went quiet.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

this part i had to look up. poke was a four-tab app. compose, inbox, friend list, settings. you picked a friend, took a photo or recorded video up to 10 seconds, picked a timer, sent. the receiver tapped to view and the timer counted down. facebook stored the content briefly on the server for delivery, then logs and copies were supposed to be deleted within 48 hours. an EFF audit shortly after launch found that facebook did not actually delete the video files for two weeks on average, which got picked up by the press for a news cycle and then forgotten.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks were the obvious ones. snapchat was the original. facebook was the polite copy with a worse ui and an older user base. teenagers in '13 were on snapchat exactly because their parents were on facebook. handing those teenagers a snapchat-shaped facebook icon was self-defeating from the first day. for whatever reason facebook seemed surprised by the failure. zuckerberg later said poke had taught the company that copying did not work against a product whose value was being not-facebook.

~ how it actually ended ~

removal day was quiet. may 9 '14, the app vanished from the store. existing copies on phones still ran for a few weeks, then the back end stopped responding. facebook had already shifted the disappearing-media bet to instagram direct, which would later become instagram stories in '16. the lesson from poke went into the playbook for that one. build it inside the host product, not as a standalone with a worse icon. by '17 instagram stories was bigger than snapchat. poke had been the unsuccessful first draft of that idea.

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