Facebook Poke App Hands On Review

Facebook just released a new app for iOS called Poke. This app is meant to compete with a very popular and successful iOS app Snapchat. With this app you can not only send a regular Facebook Poke, but a message, picture, and video to your Facebook friends. With each of these messages you can set a time limit on how long they can see the message.

There are four main ways to communicate with your Facebook friends via the poke app, poke, text, picture, and video. The regular poke function works just like it does on the website allowing you to poke your friends. The message function allows you to write a short message to send to your friends. Pictures lets you take snapshots and send them out. The video function also allows you to send videos to your recipients. All of these functions of communication allow you to set a time limit to the view the medium at which you send.

The app overall is pretty well built and straight forward. There’s only a couple downsides with the app itself that may combat with useability. First off, there’s no direct way to delete individual messages that you’ve sent or recieved, you can only delete all. I’ve also had some difficulties when opening up a message and forgetting to keep your finger pressed down, even though the time limit hasn’t been reached most of the time you can’t reopen a message as the time limit counts down.