Remember those Facebook ‘poke’ notifications? It’s still there but no longer in hiding. The social media platform is trying to bring the ‘poke’ experience back and has announced that improvements have been made around suggestions about who to ‘poke’, besides making it easier to find the ‘poking page’ through search.

It’s no surprise that Facebook is trying to make this old feature popular once again. The platform, launched on February 4, 2004, is now almost old enough to match the legal drinking age in most Indian states. That would be 21 in case you are wondering. Originally it was for Harvard University students and then the net widened to include other college students. Before Mark Zuckerberg could blink aunts and uncles joined the bandwagon. The original users of Facebook, in fact, are now in their 40s.

Facebook says the small tweaks that have been made to resurface the poke feature have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month. Young users, it appears, are starting to embrace the feature, as Facebook notes that more than 50 per cent of pokes are coming from 18- to 29-year-olds.

What is ‘poke’?

The ‘poke’ feature is among the oldest on Facebook. Over the years it became less popular and no updates were made. Why was the poke introduced? That’s a mystery but I haven’t heard anybody ‘poking’ around in the last seven-eight years. Even during the pandemic, when people had plenty of time to do the oddest of things, users didn’t ‘poke’. Yesterday I looked up my ‘poke page’ and the last time I tried to go poke-poke, it was in 2007, which eventually ended up in a marriage while another poke-poke ended up in ‘unfriending’.

After a point, the poke feature became a meme. Nobody wanted ‘poke’ notifications and it reached a point that the feature sent shivers down the spine. And ‘poking’ an acquaintance mostly painted one as the unwanted, creepy uncle going through the buffet at a wedding ceremony.

Zuckerberg posted a casual answer on the platform years ago: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose.… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.” It’s said that the notification noise that first played when you poked someone was just Zuckerberg himself going “poke”. You can listen to it on SoundCloud.

Such was the popularity of ‘poke’ in the early days that many wondered how many ‘pokes’ would greet the user during a login. And if someone poked back, it meant “mujhse fraaandship karoge” on a different level.

Poke was also a failed app from Facebook. Zuck didn’t care about its failure and said that “a few people built it as a hackathon thing, and we made one release and then just kind of abandoned it and haven’t touched it since”. One of the app’s creators posted on Facebook that they made Poke in just 12 days.

Early years of Facebook were able to solidify friendships of young adulthood, ensuring you would not lose touch with your high school or college pals. It was definitely a step up from Orkut. But things changed once Instagram appeared on the scene. And the years weren’t kind to Facebook in terms of privacy-related issues. But today, it’s just about poking, so go ahead and give that ol’ poke a nudge.