Just a few days ago, I was unexpectedly hit by a surprising poke on Facebook, after thinking that the iconic feature was long dead for years. And I was not the only one surprised, as the poke was not that random, in the end.
The reason is Meta. Facebook’s parent company decided to bring the old feature back to life, Tech Crunch reports.
Pokes have been part of Facebook since its beginnings in 2004, way before the platform went international. In late 2012, Facebook even released a standalone Pokes app for iOS (just to kill it 15 months later). The feature was as fun as it was annoying for many other users.
To be clear, Facebook Pokes were never actually dead. They were just buried in social network’s code so deep that they were almost impossible to find. And, honestly, who really remembers their exact URL?
Now, in an apparent attempt to drive more user interactions on the network, Meta has made design changes early this year to make Pokes more visible and to make people actually use the feature. One of the UI changes was displaying the Poke button when searching for existing friends.
There’s been a 13x spike in poking on the social network in the past month, says Facebook. That’s mostly thanks to the younger generation of users – specifically 18- to 29-year-olds – who weren’t on Facebook in Pokes’ glory age, Meta told Tech Crunch.
Facebook also added some other improvements and rules in 2024. For example, it now requires and shows labels on content created using AI – a new policy to make it easier for users to identify images generated by AI tools. Facebook now also blocks teens from getting DMs from unfollowed people.
Can you think of any other long-time-gone Facebook feature that you have frequently used in the past? Let us know in the comments below.