This past week I was clever enough to have 4 of my Yaks make the top “Hot” board for the local area. Not only were they “Hot”, but three of them had 3 figure upvotes. Not a shabby excuse for me to keep experimenting with my blogpost homework on a Tuesday night. So what is Yik Yak?
For those of you don’t know, Yik Yak is fastest growing social media app. It is experiencing the greatest surge in user base membership, even more so that Snapchat according to Techcrunch and could even be called a Twitter killer. Yik Yak allows users to interact in their local communities, up to a 10 mile radius, using geolocation, anonymous tweets or as Yik Yak calls them – “Yaks”. Users can publish their own content and Yak about the hottest gossip or news in their area without ever disclosing their email, phone number or any info. It’s unbiased reporting in its purest form.
For all the skeptics out there, who can continue to say that these apps are meaningless wastes of VC money look no further than Facebook. Facebook has the ability to reach more people, display more adds and collect more data about YOU than any other company on the face of the planet. So much so that is market cap is now greater than an old disappearing giant IBM. The future of media is not with CNBC, FOX, CNN, Time Warner and giant cable companies. The future is online. As Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have done with monetization someday this too will bear fruit.
Yik Yaks potential reach is tremendous. Imagine participating in the current Hong Kong protests and being able to communicate with fellow protesters, without the fear of your identity ever being exposed. Imagine the day when people report the news over Yik Yak. Imagine the day when Yik Yak helps local movements overthrow governments. Just like its bigger brother Twitter, that day looks to be in the not so distant future…
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Also – does anyone have any suggestions as to what my handle should be?
If you can’t track who is using the service, how can you convince advertisers to pay you? And surely a government could shut down such services in the event of political unrest.
1. They can’t track people by their name. However- what they do is track a UDID and IP address which is distinct to each users phone. Knowing those two pieces of information combined with GPS data, messaging history, and trends is enough to generate some sort of data revenue.
2. I suppose. The government can shut down any services it wants in the event of political unrest. Examples are: Libya – Twitter, WWII – Forced Japanese into Internment Camps, China – Google. Governments can do as they please in most instances…
Do you think that it is likely that Yik Yak will transform from an anonymous gossip social media site to something of a tool for political uprisings? This idea does remind me of the application called “Yo”, which initially was a joke application did not serve much of a purpose at all was then retooled to alert Israelis of missile attacks. These apps can do good but there may not be enough oversight for these applications to be particularly organized in protests and what not. I do wonder, however, what exactly Yik Yak is looking like in the Ferguson, MO amid that riots and protests happening there. It might be interesting to look at the Yaks and see if it has become a helpful tool to band people together or if it is just another place for people to anonymously attack each others’ views.
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