Yo is a real app that lets you send “yo” to your friends and nothing else

Remember the Hodor keyboard from a couple of weeks ago? If you thought that was stupid, you’re about to lose the final ounces of faith you had in humanity.

Yo is a new app, a real app that does one thing, and one thing only. It lets you send a “yo” text and sound notification to a friend. That “yo” can mean whatever you want it to mean. It’s simplicity taken to extreme, perhaps beyond it.

Yo

Here’s the kicker. Yo has already received $1 million (one million dollars) in venture funding. And no, this is not a joke.

Not to be confused with Yo!, another messaging app, Yo is the brainchild of Or Arbel, a former employee of photo sharing startup Mobli. Arbel’s boss asked him to code an app that would let him call his assistant as easy as possible (because, you know, typing is hard.) Arbel took the idea and ran with it. Eight hours of coding later, Yo was born.

The app was recently profiled in an extensive Financial Times article, which reveals that “50,000 users have now signed up to Yo and sent a total of 4m messages – 2m of which were in the last month.” Apparently, the app is winning “fans in design-savvy tech companies such as Foursquare, Path and Kickstarter, as well as plaudits on and from Robert Scoble.”

The father of Yo recently moved to San Francisco to take his idea of “zero character communication” to the next level. With the million in funding under his belt, Arbel plans to turn Yo in a platform, that, for instance, football teams could use to alert their users when a goal (or touchdown, whatever) is scored.

Reassuringly, even when it takes over the world, Yo will always remain faithful to yo: “You need to have just one thing. It has to be only yo.”

The day when someone gave a guy one million dollar for an app that lets you yo your way through social interactions may go down in history as the day messaging apps jumped the shark. Unless Yo gets acquired for $5 billion. In that case, this post will look really silly.

Comments

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrDq6ainJGqwam70aKrsmaTpLpwxc5manJsaW6FcA%3D%3D