Anyone with a smartphone can tell you that push notifications– even the informative kind– can be kind of annoying. It’s little wonder then why an app that poked fun of them rose so quickly to prominence.
As a joke app, Yo gained 1.7 million users and got those users to send about 50 million Yo’s. The concept was simple: you send your friend a Yo, they get a push notification. It removed the hassle of the labor-intensive process it takes to construct a text. It toyed with the concept of push notifications as they were probably never meant to be toyed with.
It was so simple, it was easy to dismiss. Marketers everywhere went from “What is this thing called Yo “ to “OK. That’s simple.” to “What in the world could this possibly be used for “
It seems that the people behind the Yo app went through much the same process and in doing so, made Yo secretly more awesome. Yo is a sleeper.
A new update to Yo has added IFTTT integration, now allowing anyone to use Yo to trigger actions made with IFTTT “recipes.” You can essentially set up a social campaign to automatically trigger Yo’s to followers. There are also link attachments. There are also hashtags.
“This version shows the real power of the Yo platform which is, at its most basic, a 2-way communication platform between people, websites, brands, businesses and virtually anything that can connect to the internet,” said Yo in a blog post on Medium.
Yo has accomplished these changes without throwing a wrench into the core functionality and simplicity of the platform. At the same time, Yo is becoming more helpful to users. With new developer access, marketers can create their own Yo service and be added to the index. RSS feeds can also send automatic Yo’s.
Looking for metrics Yo counts how many Yo’ers have used your hashtag and you know exactly how many Yo’s you receive back.
The stupidly simple platform has finally shown it is really a veritable iceberg of complexities. Yo’s time has come.
