Two Point Yo! – The latest Yo! Updates

Since my review on this app, I have deleted it and moved on with my life. I’d tried it out for a few weeks and even gotten one or two crazies to try it out with me (considering how many crazy people I know that are willing to try almost anything, my Yo! contact list was very, very thin). It’s pretty hard to convince a crazy to stick with an app that will really only let you do one thing – two if you consider the double tap to get a Yo! Yo! especially considering the thousands of apps out there. So I deleted it and moved on.

I’d been somewhere out on a Tibetan mountain meditating, when a man from a top secret wing of the government delivered the news to me. Yo! had received an upgrade. I had to strap on my old red bandana and reinstall the sham of an app and see what new threats it posed to the world.

For those of you that do not know, Yo is a single-tap zero-character communication tool. Its functionality depends on the time of the Yo, the recipient and of course you the user. You feel like letting your crush know you’re thinking about them? Just Yo. You want to say “Good morning”? just Yo. You want to irritate your worst enemy a little? Send them a hundred Yos. The possibilities are meant to be endless depending on the context.

The shiny new update now has a profile picture option, as well as one to include your actual name. Swipe right and you can see your contacts’ profiles. This feature is meant to reduce confusion because most contacts wouldn’t use their real names. However, people can still opt to use fake aliases in their profile names. Problem barely solved.

The shiniest feature of the new Yo has to be its index. Under this tab, you can select (and add) services to receive Yotifications from. You can choose to receive a push notification every time you receive a payment on PayPal. You could watch your water drinking habits by adding ‘YOWATER’ to your contacts and sending a Yo to it when you have a glass, and it’ll keep track of how many glasses you take. You can even receive an alert every time there’s an incoming missile in an Israeli area. ‘Hardboiled Yo’ sends you a Yo when your egg is done boiling. ‘InstaYo’ says Yo when your favourite Instagram users post a pic. There are many more to choose from. A number of them of course, aren’t relevant here in Zambia.

A feature under the index that could be of some use is the hashtag counter. You can send hashtags in the app and this counter tallies how many times your particular topic has been sent. This could be useful for brands trying to target specific audiences or monitor a marketing campaign.

Or Arbel and his people have put in a little effort to shake this app up a little. Many people the world over have regarded it as a joke, but its creator has confirmed that they have received $1.5 million from investors since the app launched.

“This version shows the real power of the Yo platform,” a recent blog post from the company said, “which is at its most basic, a 2-way communication platform between people, websites, brands, businesses and virtually anything that can connect to the internet.”

I’ll give them a little credit for the effort though. You can even attach links to your Yos now. The company has also been taking suggestions through a forum. These improvements do make a little difference, but all these new bells and whistles do is sweep dirt under a carpet. At the heart and soul of this app is simplicity, but that may also be its drawback. It barely provides any solutions or advantages with its notifications. Surely one does not need an app to tell them when their egg has boiled.

A valiant effort by the Yo team, but I am still not convinced that this app deserves $1.5 million. I’m returning to Tibet and moving on with my life again.

Image Credits: IT Pro Portal, Writer’s Screenshots