Facebook has finally found a way to recycle one of its oldest features—the once-famous Poke.
Pokes, once one of the main ways you'd get friends' attention on the site, are all but buried now. But Facebook has now reimagined the feature as a mobile app.
Unlike the old Poke, the new mobile Poke app lets you do a lot more, like send photos and videos. In that way, it reminds us of Snapchat, an app which lets you take a photo which self-destructs so it's harder for friends to store and embarrass you with later.
Facebook Poke allows users to send a classic poke—basically an alert; a text message; or a video or photo. You can poke one friend or multiple friends at once.
The messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time—1, 3, 5, or 10 seconds. In that way, the Poke app is also similar to Wickr, a super-secure messaging app.
The self-destructing feature common to Snapchat and Poke makes us think that both are inevitably going to be used for sexting, or sending racy photos, since there's less risk that the photos will end up posted on the Internet. (Snapchat's creators have denied that that's a major reason why people use the app.)
When we attempted to download we had a tough time finding it in Apple's App Store. If you're having trouble too try to download it through this link on your iPhone.
We couldn't find the app by searching Apple's App Store so we emailed the link to our phone and opened it that way.
Here's the icon.
Since we were already signed into our Facebook account on our iPhone, the app recognized us. We tapped our name to continue.
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