10 ms·
The accidental genius of Yo
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoTangential, but I would be curious to know if "capiche" refers to the Italian "capisci?", which is Neapolitan dialect meaning "do you understand?".
- pmichaud 6y agoMy impression is that the word was popularized from mafia movies depicting Italian mafia guys saying it, and that it means like "understand?" or "get it?"
- jpxw 6y agoWe're hip hop sharecroppers Used to wear flip flops, now rare gear coppers He's in it for the quiche You might as well not ask him for no free s___, capiche? Google tells me it’s “from Italian capisce third person singular present tense of capire ‘understand’”
- rrdharan 6y agoThe madvillainy is unnecessary, but appreciated.
- vagrantJin 6y agoMadvillainy is life tho.
- np_tedious 6y agoYes. The last vowel is often dropped (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocope) esp by Italian Americans. This also makes it work for nearly every conjugation so it can be the question (do you understand) as well as the answer (I understand).
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here—yup, it’s based on the Italian word.
- inciampati 6y agoIs that the standard way to write the word in english? It'd be pronounced "kapikay" (ch=k) rather than capisce (sce=shhe) if read in italian.
- drewbug 6y agojust like "Yo"
- delcaran 6y agoIt's not really Neapolitan, it's Italian plain and simple.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoNot really. The soft "sc" with a mute "e" at the end is typical of souther Italian dialects, including neapolitan and sicilian. When you say "capisc?", instead of "capisce?" (written: capisci?), Italians mostly feel that the word is said following a southern Italian dialect.
- jasonv 6y agoMy shortcut to text my partner is called “Yo” and sends a “Yo”. Use it all the time. She knows when I’m leaving a store, or swinging by the house to pick her up, or when we’re in a store and ready to meet at the checkout lanes. I think frequently that the app could’ve survived and have been useful. The iterations they went through took it in less useful directions, but the idea itself didn’t need to die. Feels like a lost opportunity.
- andruby 6y agoBut how could they’ve monetized? Would you still use it with ads inserted?
- crtasm 6y agoMerch. Get your Yo baseball cap and coffee mug. Enjoying this line from the post: "At some level of abstraction, it’s Yo all the way down."
- boxed 6y agoSell it for the minimum prize?
- hengheng 6y agoWhat would be the cost of running it? How much would it take to make it profitable?
- primitivesuave 6y agoAs you enter a bar your phone buzzes. "I just got a Yo from Heineken!" If you're not disgusted at that point by an app tracking your location to sell you things, you will probably be more likely to order a Heineken.
- mhh__ 6y agoWhen you say monetized do you mean buy a car or buy an island type money. You could definitely market it well enough to sell some merchandise or similar, it's just not going to make you a billionaire.
- adamnemecek 6y agoThis article is like four years late.
- sambostock 6y agoYears ago, I hooked up my apartment buzzer to Yo with a raspberry pi. https://github.com/sambostock/yoorbell https://github.com/sambostock/yoorbell It was super insecure, but if you yo'd it, it would let you in, and if someone buzzed the buzzer, it would yo me. Exactly as much info as needed.
- Swizec 6y agoReminds me of the saying that millenials are killing the doorbell industry by texting “here”
- treeman79 6y agoMy doorbell broke months ago. Eventually I decided I like it much better this way.
- pmiller2 6y agoTell that to my neighbors, whose guests love to sit out in the parking lot of my apartment building and honk to get their attention. :/
- ryantgtg 6y agoMy neighbors used to do that, prompting me to make this comic: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/tmt-comics/buttloads-apps https://www.tinymixtapes.com/tmt-comics/buttloads-apps
- educated_idiot 6y agoLol, this is hilarious.
- aripickar 6y agoOoh I did a similar thing at in college where I used a raspberry pie to hook up the door handle to speakers to play “The Boys are Back in Town” whenever someone opened up our front door at the beginning of the semester.
- cblconfederate 6y agoDoes the app still exist?
- gwern 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) says the company has shut down but the app still works (not too surprisingly given its simplicity) with occasional minimal maintenance by the founder.
- maguay 6y agoIt’s still around, saved by crowdfunding, though its apps haven’t been optimized for newer phone screen sizes. I haven’t used it regularly for years now though, but the idea’s always stuck with me.
- beingrichishard 6y agoAnyone heard about the re-tooling of Yo by the Israeli Missle Notification Service? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28247504 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28247504
- pcardoso 6y agoYears ago calling and immediately hanging up was immensely popular among teenagers/young adults as a way to ping someone. Used as a way of flirting, telling something was ready, arrived at home.
- runarberg 6y agoIf you had enough credit to make a phone call, but didn’t want to waste your credits on a text, calling and hanging up is the rational thing to do as it costs nothing (provided you hang up before the other party answers). The price of a text for a teenager was significant back then. The other party might be a parent who could use a landline to call you back for cheaper, or a friend who called back using their parent’s landline. Of course this tactic wouldn’t work in places where the receiver of phone call has to pay a portion of the price.
- ehnto 6y agoIn my country if you had no credit at all, for some reason you could still dial for long enough that the person recieved a brief blip and a missed call. That was invaluable as a teenager as if I was stuck I could blip my parents and they could call back properly.
- beamatronic 6y agoThis context is helpful. They hacked the system to take advantage of free notifications.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gadders 6y agoYears and years ago (like the 1970's) way before mobile phones, and phonecalls weren't particularly cheap it was common to give someone "three rings" to let them know you had arrived home safely after leaving them.
- treeman79 6y agoGrowing up, My dad wasn’t allowed to make personal calls at work. Calling and hanging up didn’t count, so that is what we would do. We would know to call back. Years later I ran reports for call centers. I would run data every which way. Found an agent that would dial a disconnect number hundreds of times a day. Went to big boss, as I couldn’t figure out the rational. He took one look at it, and cursed “well know we know how he has top numbers. Found so many ways agents would mess with metrics
- bot41 6y agoSo what happened to the $1.2 million?
- ktpsns 6y agoSame question here. I guess it was used up. But: There was a hype, why didn't more money come in? Was this a flopped startup?
- christiansakai 6y agoAh, Yo hackathon was my first hackathon event after I graduated from a bootcamp 6 years ago. That was fun. This brings back memories.
- harryf 6y agoBack when Yo was initially on the hype curve we created a clone for Switzerland called Hoi (a Swiss German way to say Hi) for a joke - link to some press we got below - one of the guys in the picture wasn’t even really involved we just included him and called him CEO to add to the craziness. Technically we had pretty good native iOS and Android apps, backend running on Parse.com (RIP). We got about 10K downloads until Yo actually tried to come after us via the iOS App Store with a vague claim of copying. We defended it OK, no lawyers required but it seemed kinda uncool. We even got our photos in Schweizer Illustriete, which is a dumb magazine featuring Swiss stars - it was the summer media hole so they were desperate. We also ended up adding features Yo didn’t have like sending a photo with your “Hoi” ... took less than 1 week until random strangers were sending naked parts of their body - freaked me out that anyone would trust a random app with their privacy... Then the hype blew over, Parse shut down and we lost interest until I actually met the Yo CEO at a mobile event in Berlin, and after initially accosting him we ended up taking a selfie together and made up. Anyway just a random anecdote of developers with too much time on their hands. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/app-hoi-schweizer-klonen-die-anstupps-app-yo-a-982582-amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/ap...
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y agoAMP is a cancer on the internet [0]. Here's the non-Google-AMP version of your link: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/app-hoi-schweizer-klonen-die-anstupps-app-yo-a-982582.html https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/app-hoi-schweizer-klone... [0] https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_g...
- harryf 6y agoI know but I get paywalled for some reason when I link directly to the article, and not via AMP
- tlarkworthy 6y agoThe article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. It's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit, its a timestamps worth in fact... /pedant
- hk__2 6y ago> The article repeatedly makes the mistaken assertion that sending a 'Yo' constitutes 1 bit of information transmitted. This is mistaken as the information also holds temporal information, which is actually what is very useful. t's not a Yo at some random point, it's a Yo now. It's really encoding "now!". Still not very much information but a ton more than 1 bit. It’s still one bit. The time is not part of the transmission.
- capableweb 6y agoTime is absolutely part of the transmission. It matters when you say "Hi" to someone. Differently timed "Hi"'s can say different things. Even if you repeat "Hi" many times, it's still just "Hi" but the amount of them also matters and becomes part of the transmission when looking at all of them together. I feel like many, especially developers, fail to see what is in between the data to matter as well as the data itself. Seems like a common hole to fall into.
- admax88q 6y agoIf we're in different locations and we run a wire between us, and I send a single pulse down the wire. That's one bit of information. You as the receiver derive the other relevant information from that. A timestamp was not encoded and transmitted, a single bit (pulse) was transmitted from me to you. That's the thesis of the article I believe. That single bit can "carry" a lot of additional information due to the context and understanding of the receiver. Information that wasn't actually transmitted in the message, but derived from it.
- jay_wild 6y agoThere's got to be a similar market for "push notification as a service". I wouldn't mind giving a company $20 for credits for 500 push notifications. I hit their API, they push to my phone with whatever text I give them.
- molmsted98 6y agoI've been using Pushcut on iOS for this purpose, there's a lot of customizability offered including replying with actions. Add in using IFTTT to call the Pushcut notification webhook and then automation gets a lot easier than doing it by hand.
- jtsiskin 6y agoSMS (twilio) and most chat apps (slack, discord, Facebook messenger, Telegram,GroupMe, etc.) offer this functionality. Is there something you want that using one of these would not satisfy?
- renewiltord 6y agoThe Pushbullet service was for this. But you could possibly use the Zapier free tier and Twilio SMS and build something even cheaper.
- dagurp 6y agoI think pushover is what you're looking for
- The_rationalist 6y agoLol I remember playing with it, it was fun! There was also a similar app where you sended beer! Actually those genius level applications are not really innovative as people were spamming pokes on Facebook far before their advent
- The_rationalist 6y agoIs there an alternative yo app that automatically send yo on your fb messenger friend?
- jobigoud 6y agoWhy does it say "accidental" genius? Did the creator not create the app on purpose to be a "ping" for humans?
- nobodyandproud 6y agoShowmanship and lure. In the same spirit as the titles like “unreasonably effective”, and a few others gems. It turns me off from the content immediately, but ‘m likely the exception.
- spiznnx 6y agoThis reminds me of feature I liked about Google's Duo app (like Facetime): send a heart. It's pretty clear what the heart means in the context of a video call app: "I am currently thinking about you and wouldn't mind a video call, if you want to." It solves the problem of instant-anxiety of getting an impromptu video call when you weren't expecting one. Unfortunately now you can send one of 10 different emoji instead of just the heart, complicating the feature unnecessarily by adding more bits.
- maguay 6y agoThat would be a great feature—random video calls are absolutely worse than random phone calls since the former requires you look presentable.
- kybernetikos 6y agoI noticed the gradual reduction of message length too when Yo came out (email -> tweet -> yo), and wondered what it would mean to transmit less than a single bit of information. I came to the conclusion that it would be a messaging system, somewhat like yo where sometimes it would send a notification even when I hadn't told it to. If you configured it so it sent an extra notification randomly for every notification you sent, then you're conveying approximately half a bit of information. Strangely enough, I think this could be quite useful, as a way of initiating conversations with people you would otherwise lose contact with.
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here, agreed, and using something like that to stay lightly in touch with people ideally would have potential. Strangely I think it could have possibly worked in Facebook better if they hadn't named their "notify someone without a message" feature _Poke_.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agono matter how many times your try to make this a truth, it wont happen. It was funny, not genius.
- Igelau 6y agoso it's "poke" without facebook