No more poke
For the past few months I’ve been noticing that I’ve been unable to poke people I don’t know on facebook. At first I dismissed this as perhaps it being a case of more people disabling the poke feature (and since I was mainly poking hot girls I figured they’d be the most likely to disable the poke feature so it made some logical sense). However slowly I realised that I literally could not poke anyone who was not a friend so I wondered perhaps if facebook and disabled me from poking, though I thought this would be weird since I definitely don’t poke like a spammer.
So I contacted facebook and just go this reply:
“Unfortunately, the “Poke” option is no longer available from search results. You will still be able to poke your friends using the link below their profile picture. However, if you are not able to view an individual’s profile, you will no longer have the option to poke that person. Sorry for any inconvenience. “
In my opinion this is a truly bad decision. Reasons:
- I never poke my friends. Why would I when I can communicate with them via their wall, messaging or now chat? The whole point of the poke is that it’s supposed to be a discovery tool.
- There’s a lot of people who use facebook as a way to meet random girls/guys (which makes sense, the mantra from Jamie Zawinski that you should think about how your software will get you laid is 100% true) and the poke is the perfect way to initialize that communication.
I can honestly imagine the facebook usage time of a quite a few of my friends (no names mentioned) falling dramatically as a result of there being no poke.
The only reason I can think of as to why facebook did this is presumably because of some form of spam problem arising from the poke. Maybe people were creating fake accounts and poking hundreds of people at a time or some variant thereof. This is obviously a problem but I feel that the response here is grossly excessive (if someone knows the actual reason please feel free to end my speculation).
I love facebook but this is the first product decision I’ve actually been genuinely annoyed about. I’m also well aware that by defending the poke so passionately, I leave myself open to a number of jokes but such is life.