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"Yo," I said to my colleague Kim Bhasin shortly after I joined The Huffington Post in 2014.
His eyes widened along with his smile as he asked me, "Do you have the Yo app?"
I didn't. Despite joining HuffPost as a tech reporter, I hadn't heard of Yo, an app that only let users say "yo" to each another and had climbed toward the top of Apple's App Store, obviously. Kim was quick to point out the hypocrisy, but to be fair (to myself), I had fallen into the job, and Yo might have been my common way of greeting people at age 22 (and still to this day), but it wasn't an app on my iPhone — until a couple minutes after that exchange.
I Yo'ed, for a few months. But the app is long gone from my phone, and soon that purple app icon may disappear from every device. This week the Yo app alerted the world to its potential future by tweeting not simply "yo" but a link to a Patreon account. A Medium post published on Tuesday reads,
If you want to help keep Yo running,
head over to: https://www.patreon.com/yoapp.
Love,
Yo
It's true. The fate of Yo is up to the people via a crowdfunding campaign on Patreon. When I downloaded Yo four years ago, I thought it was "dumb." It's still rather dumb. But at a time when other tech giants are manipulating our elections or spying on our private data and new startups are lying and cheating their way to success, Yo's simplicity and honesty is something to appreciate, and I say should be kept alive.
When asked why people should want to save Yo, cofounder Or Arbel told Mashable, "They shouldn't. Unless they use it and want to keep using it, then they should."
So the question is, Do people still use Yo? And, do people want to keep using Yo?
The answer to the first question is yes:
@YoApp The past few days I'm getting failure notifications, and I see your website is throwing a 502 error. What's up, Yo?
— Landon Harris (@BoldInterrobang) August 10, 2017
Harris, a Yo user since 2014, told Mashable that he had downloaded Yo "because it was the 'cool' thing to do.'" While the hype quickly faded, Harris began Yo'ing again last year.
"I recently was using it again last summer with a person that I was dating as a way to say 'Hey I'm thinking of you' without having to send a text or expect a response," Harris said.
Harris isn't the only one who found love on Yo. Arbel said whenever the service goes down, which happened a few times over the past few months, he receives support emails "pleading" to get Yo backup. In October, a Twitter exchange with a Yo user prompted by an outage also sparked the idea of a crowdfunding initiative.
.@orarbel @agoode8008 Another week another YOutage. YO has been down for at least 1.5 days now. Can we help get it back and make it work?
— todd underwood (@tmu) October 5, 2017
Should be up now but at this point I would recommend moving off the platform to something more maintained
— Or Arbel (@orarbel) October 5, 2017
. @orarbel thanks! sad! can we transition to a community maintenance of the server side or is Yo really and truly dying?
— todd underwood (@tmu) October 5, 2017
Back in 2014, Yo had raised $1 million from venture capital firms like Betaworks and Slow Ventures and angel investors including Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore. But those funds are long gone. Snapchat reportedly paid $7.7 million for the rights to a patent application from the Yo founder, but according to Arbel, that money was "not related to Yo at all" and instead directed to the company Mobli.
Since 2016, Yo, the company, has dispersed, and Yo, the app, has been running on "autopilot," according to Arbel. Former employees have moved on to other tech companies, like Facebook and Netflix, he noted. Moshe Hogeg, the former CEO of photo and video sharing service Mobli who had instructed Arbel to launch an app that notified his assistant he needed her (a.k.a. Yo) in 2014, is now running a blockchain startup. Arbel has worked at Anima, a startup for automating front-end development, over the last year.
But despite the team breaking up, Arbel couldn't just shut down Yo without a fight, or rather a plea. Unlike when Twitter shut down six-second-video app Vine and sent its a community into chaos, Yo is asking its own community whether or not it should stay alive.
"Yo is still loved by so many people, we feel it would be a disservice to the community to pull the plug. At this point, it's up to the community to decide if Yo is here to stay, and that's why we launched this crowdfunding campaign," he said.
As of Thursday, Yo has 27 patrons. It's seeking at least 5,000. I wasn't one of those remaining Yo users I referred to above. When I re-downloaded Yo to my phone while working on this piece, I saw that none of my contacts were on anymore. I tried to convince my best friend to join by sending her a quick text through the Yo app:
No.
She wasn't convinced.
When I consider Yo, I think of something fun and enjoyable. Unlike many of the apps these days, they weren't seeking immediate profits, they weren't about making money. It was just a reminder that someone was thinking about you, or they needed you, and we could use our smartphones and technology without being invasive into our own or each other's lives. Okay, some people may not like push notifications, but smart Yo users don't abuse them — unless necessary.
While Yo was a simple product, the team behind it innovated quickly. Mashable wrote about an update in August 2014 where users could "attach links to their messages and express support for topics by sending a quick hashtag message." The team also launched the Yo API, where yo'ing was no longer just friend-to-friend. Yo users could opt to receive a "yo" when FedEx sent a package or when there was an earthquake greater than a certain magnitude.
"Yo was an attempt to break all the known rules of how information can be conveyed."
"Yo was an attempt to break all the known rules of how information can be conveyed. In a world of cognitive overload, Yo tried to transfer messages with as little information as possible. That's completely counter-intuitive and crazy. But I think that's also what people loved about it," Arbel said.
The world has only gotten crazier since Yo entered our lives. Mobile push notifications are now a core digital strategy of any company. Trying to break through the noise is even more relevant after Facebook lessened their relationship with publishers on the News Feed.
What Yo did show is that ideas can spread, no matter whether they take years to build or, for Arbel, about eight hours.
"While Yo may not have become the next Twitter, it's a great illustration of how quickly an idea can turn into a product and reach millions of people. It's a great time to be a maker," said Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt and former Yo user.
If Yo were to shut down, another Yo could sprout up, not unlike Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann building V2 (don't call it Vine 2).
But if there's still joy to be had from Yo, let's just keep Yo. We only need 5,000 people.
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