Facebook has resurrected “poke” and apparently, it is young people who are taking advantage of the functionality according to the figures put forward by Meta, the parent company of the social network.
You who experienced the first years of the social network Facebooklaunched in 2004 anyway, do you remember the “poke”? This button took the shape of a hand pointing the index finger to the right and was mainly used to To get in touch with someone in a less direct way than a message. Kind of like tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention. At the time, it was an iconic feature of the social network. Some will remember the animated series South Park who takes it over for one episode with the famous line “Stan poke your grandmother”.
As time passes, poke falls into disuse and quietly disappears from Facebook. Not entirely that said. From a purely technical point of view, it has always been possible to “poker” people on the social network, but to do this you had to navigate through the intricacies of the site settings or type “poke” in the search bar. It is now much simpler since the poke button returned in early 2024 in a redesigned design.
Facebook is putting “poke” back in the spotlight and young people are taking it over
When you search for someone’s name, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network brings up the poke button next to the one that allows you to send a message. It doesn’t show up in our testing, and Facebook doesn’t specify whether this is US-only or is being rolled out elsewhere. Still, the return of poke obviously works: Meta affirms that its use has increased 13-fold since the graphic change. We don’t know the starting number, however.
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More than 50% of new pokes come from young people aged 18 to 29. This is all the more surprising since this generation is generally no longer on Facebook for its social aspect. Difficult to say if this is a passing fad among people who have not experienced the original poke, or if the functionality will experience a new boom among all users.
Source: Business Insider