This New App Is So Simple, It's Raking In Millions, Yo

Arbel's response was less than enthusiastic at first: "I told him it will take me two hours to do it, but I’m not going to do it, because it's a silly idea."

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Arbel was wrong about two things: He did end up doing it. And it took him eight hours to build the initial version, not two.

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And if you're feeling particularly chatty, you can double tap a contact's name to say "YoYo." Those are the only ways to communicate within the app.

haaretz.com

Thus the Yo app became the conversation of the day among the startup crowd in Silicon Valley and New York, who tweeted how excited they were at using it. As interest burgeoned, Arbel moved to San Francisco last week. News sites started reporting on Yo in droves and downloads doubled overnight.

The idea of an app dedicated to simply saying "yo" would likely have been easy enough to poke fun at, but the article noted that investors had contributed $1 million toward the app. That detail lit a fire on Twitter.

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"Yo is more than hey," Arbel said. "Yo can mean anything. 'Hey' means 'hey,' but 'yo' can mean everything. It's the perfect word. There's no other word can be used at much."

businessinsider.in

“Everyone wanted me to add features, but I refused,” he says. “If you add more words, like ‘Good morning,’ ‘What’s up?’ and ‘Hello’ then the app only knows how to send these words. If you have only the word ‘Yo,’ then it has to be everything. If you want to send it in the morning, it’s basically ‘Good morning.’ If you send it in the middle of the day you are asking ‘What’s up?’ If your boss sends it to you he wants you to come, and if you send it at night you are basically asking ‘You up?’ It all depends on the time, the sender and the context.”

haaretz.com

You have a list of contacts. You tap one of those contacts, and they receive a notification saying simply, "Yo", along with an audio alert of the word being spoken. According to the app's description, it can mean pretty much whatever the sender wants it to mean, depending on context.

"It has tons of uses, more than you might think. Our next stage is to bring out a programming interface so developers can integrate with our app and other bodies can use our service."

venturebeat.com

“Say, for example, Haaretz decides that anyone connected to it through Yo should get a Yo every time there is breaking news – it could bring you a lot of engagement. Modification is very simple. It is not like a complicated text you have to open and read. If the story grabs your interest, you’ll check the website.”

haaretz.com

Yo created the username WorldCup on the occasion of the international soccer competition to demonstrate this possibility. Anyone joining this handle receives a Yo message every time a goal is scored. At the moment, this involves a human watching the game and manually sending the alerts, but that won't always be the case.

mashable.com

"If you think this is just an app that says 'Yo,' you are getting it wrong," he says. "It's a new way to get lightweight, non-intrusive notifications. We are here to cut through the noise. We like to call it context-based messaging."

venturebeat.com

We could probably write something about how this app somehow epitomizes the trend toward frictionless communication, or scoff at the idea of investors throwing money at any app that somehow fits into the social/mobile category. Or we could just point out the irony that an app which lets you send a two-letter word over and over is somehow getting more buzz today than Facebook's new messaging app, Slingshot. But for now, we'll just say "yo."

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