Facebook Poke App Is Frustrating as Hell

Hands On With Facebook Poke 1. Facebook Poke: Startup Screen Poke, the new iPhone app from Facebook, lets you send short messages, photos and videos to friends that automatically self destruct after a few seconds. If you have the Facebook app on your phone already, logging in is effortless. 2. Instructions These are the scantinstructions you get when you first start using Poke. 3. Poke Recipients You can choose any of your Facebook friends, or multiple friends, to receive a poke. 4. Poke Feed Although there's no record of the pokes themselves on either person's phone, a list of the people you've poked, and gotten pokes from, is always visible. 5. Poke Pic You can add text toimages, letting you easily "meme-ify" apoke. 6. Drawing on Photos Poke lets you drawon photos as well, in multiple colors. 7. Duration The sender determines the lifetime of a poke, from a single second all the way up to 10. Once the recipient clicks, the countdown begins,and there's no going back. 8. Notifications Facebook users willonly be informed of pokes in the Facebook mobile app — it won't appear on the web version. Users can only view pokes in the Poke app, so your Android friends are out of luck, for now. 9. Countdown When you start viewing a poke, you need to hold your finger on the screen. A countdown appears letting youknow how much time you have left. 10. Screencap Alert If a recipient of your poke makes a screencap of it, the app will let you know via a"flash" icon. I was never a big poker on Facebook . When I joined the social networkin 2007, giving someonea "poke" was still pretty common. It was a connection that stopped short of an actual friend request, a way to test thewaters of a reconnectionwith, say, an ex. The new app, Facebook Poke (as it's listed in the App Store ), doesn't have much in common with poking of old. It's essentially a clone of other texting apps where all the messages have a built-in self-destruct. It's ideal forclandestine activities, shall we say. Here's how it works: Let's say you have a sudden urge to send oneof your Facebook friendsa photo of a, er, cucumber. But you don't want to just send them a cucumber pic that they could post and re-share to the world. Poke lets you send the pic, but the recipient will only have 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds to view your majestic vegetable. And they needto press and hold the screen while viewing, or the pic goes away. You can send photos, videos or text messages via Poke, although you can't use it for anything too elaborate since the message content lasts 10seconds maximum. After that, boom. The message,whatever it was, is gone forever. There isn't even a record on the sender's phone (although a log of who you've poked and who's poked you still remains).