Juniors take the ‘Yo.’ app to the next level

Senior Anshika Maheshwari reaches for her constantly buzzing phone in class. She receives a message: “YoFrom from Vivek Murthy at the Stairway to the Roof.” A few seconds later, she replies by sending back her location.

This is the scenario juniors Aakash Thumaty and Spencer Yen envisioned over the summer when they created “YoFrom,” a simple messaging app that allows people to send their locations to their friends.

Yo is a simple, yet powerful greeting — a slightly more exciting alternative to the usual “Hey” or “Hi.” In fact, a few developers created an app that initially had no other purpose but to send other users a notification with the message: “Yo.”

The app, aptly named “Yo.,” launched as a joke on April Fools’ Day 2014. Since its release, the app received a $10 million valuation, attracting over 50,000 active users who have sent over 4 million Yo’s in total.

However, Yo isn’t all about messaging; it’s about notifications and alerts. Yo has the potential to be an entirely new platform, and it is headed in that direction.

Recently, Yo released an update to its app that now allows users to send more than just a Yo. The once incredibly simple app is now losing its simplicity, but gaining relevancy. Users can now attach links and hashtags, and add new services to receive Yos from. Imagine receiving Yo’s from your favorite store when it’s having a huge sale, your favorite TV show when its season finale is on or your favorite artists when they release a new song.

Since its surge in popularity, other developers have riffed on the Yo concept, making it even more useful.

Yen and Thumaty, while interning at Everalbum, a company that organizes photographs on all devices, decided to have a “mini-hackathon and code all night alone in the office.” Yen said they originally intended on working on the company’s app, but one of the employees decided he wanted to join Yen and Thumaty in coding just for fun. According to Yen, he brainstormed “random cool ideas,” YoFrom being one of them.

Intrigued by the idea, Yen and Thumaty decided to put their other work aside and build it overnight.

“[Thumaty] and I [built the app for] iOS,” Yen said. “The other guy did Android. About five hours later, we were ‘YoFrom-ing’ each other from the office.”

“Basically there were a bunch of ‘Yo clones’ and we thought [YoFrom] would be a useful variation,” Yen said. “We made it just for fun.”

To date, the app has a few hundred downloads and roughly 100 YoFroms are being sent daily.

YoFrom’s publicity spiked when it was featured on the popular technology blog, “TechCrunch.”

“We emailed probably 70 reporters from about 15 publications with our main pitch being that we were high school interns,” Yen said.

Yen said nobody responded after 24 hours.

“[Thumaty] even snuck into the TechCrunch offices to try to get them to write about us, but was turned back,” Yen said. “At this point, we had pretty much given up.”

Around four days later, TechCrunch published an article showcasing a collection of Yo clones. YoFrom was first on the list.

“It didn’t get us as many users as we expected,” Yen said. “But it still gave us a decent amount.”

Despite the feature on TechCrunch not becoming as big of a success as Yen had hoped for, numerous students at SHS continue to use the app frequently.

“It's fun to send random locations to my friends, especially when they aren’t totally accurate,” senior Anshika Maheshwari said.

Maheshwari believes that the locations, which are linked to Foursquare, are amusing because they are often incorrect and include places she’s never heard of before.

“I use it because it's entertaining to see all the random places, most of which I haven't even heard of, show up on the app, and send it to my friends,” Maheshwari said.

Maheshwari said she does not use the app only because of its inaccurate and funny locations, but because three of her closest friends use it as well.

Although Maheshwari said she is obsessed with sending the default locations to her friends, she said that “[YoFrom] could be improved by letting users type in their own locations to send.”

In regard to YoFrom’s future plans, Thumaty said he wants to get as many people to use the app as possible.

“We think it’s a fun and cool idea, an easy way to share your location, and we just want other people to think that too,” Thumaty said. “Download YoFrom.”