A few days ago, I unexpectedly received a surprising poke (Pokes) on Facebook, an iconic feature that I thought had been dead for many years. The reason is Meta, Facebook's parent company, decided to bring this old feature back to life. Pokes has been part of Facebook since 2004, long before the platform went international.
In late 2012, Facebook even released a standalone Pokes app on iOS (it was pulled 15 months later). For many other users, this feature is both interesting and annoying.
FacebookPokes aren't actually dead, they're just buried deep in the social network's code and nearly impossible to find. Who still remembers their exact URL?
Now, in an effort to drive more user interaction on the web, Meta made design changes earlier this year to make Pokes more visible and let people actually use the feature. One of the user interface changes is the display of a Poke button when searching for existing friends.
Facebook said Pokes gaming on the social network has surged 13-fold in the past month, largely thanks to a younger generation of users, particularly 18 to 29-year-olds, who weren't on Facebook during Pokes' glory days.
In 2024, Facebook also added some other improvements and rules. For example, it now requires labels to be displayed on content created using artificial intelligence -- a new policy designed to make it easier for users to identify images generated by AI tools. Now, Facebook is also blocking teens from getting private messages from people they don’t follow.