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After more than 10 years Facebook’s design has gone through several iterations and many different features died, while others were introduced. However there is still one mystery feature that is still there, the Poke. A feature that, even after ten years, probably no one has ever understood. It’s one of those nonsense features that every product must have. As Soleio says on Quora, an early Facebook designer (2005-2011), the poke was firstly introduced by Mark Zuckerberg.
Adam D’Angelo, the first Facebook’s CTO, doesn’t remember if the feature was implemented on the first version or a few weeks after launch, but what we can surely say is that it has been on the social network for more than 10 years. If we look back we see a lot of things that have changed, because when Facebook was firstly launched, there was nothing. People could just become friends and check other people’s profile.
There was no chat, no wall, nothing. The only social interactions were based on the fact that people wanted to check other people’s profiles and see the friends in common. It was something completely new and no one was expecting a chat or a news feed. The connections were more important than anything else. In this social context a feature, such as the Poke, was fundamental to keep the people more engaged with the website.
The Poke could be thought as the first implementation of the like button on profiles. The only difference is that if you get poked back, you can poke the person again. In a University environment, where we have students between 18-25, the Poke is everything. It might be thought either as a way to say that you have checked the person’s profile or as a sign of interest. If I poke a friend of mine, it might seem just as a way to bother him (in 2014), but in 2004 was probably intended as a way to see that “it’s cool to see you on Facebook”.
What hasn’t changed in 10 years is the Poke to a girl that I might like. It can be interpreted in a friendly way, but If I poke a girl, it means I am interested in her (if she is not a close friend) and that’s why the Poke was and still is a game changing feature. That’s why we don’t see many Pokes around. Facebook lets us check other people’s profile without being noticed, even those of the people we really like or love, but when we poke someone is like saying “yes, I have checked you more than once”.
From an anthropological point of view, in the context of Universities, it’s remarkable to see how a simple concept can be that powerful. If you don’t specify the meaning of a feature, every single person will have a different opinion about it, because there isn’t any right truth about it. I personally think the Poke has driven several generations of people crazy.
I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg will ever take down the Poke, because it’s the only thing that reminds him how cool Facebook was when he started it and his college period. The Poke is a piece of history that highlights Facebook’s first moments around Harvard Campus, where more than half of the people signed up to the service in less than a week, just because it was something new.
