The poke was one of Facebook’s first features, which Zuckerberg launched in college in 2004 as The Facebook. Poking someone alerts them that the other person has poked them. It might be playful, pleasant, or just strangely bizarre.
In 2005, while Facebook was still only available to college students, “CBS Sunday Morning” did a piece on young tech pioneers, featuring a young woman who ran a website for camcorder reviews, the designer of the Firefox browser, and a young guy named Mark Zuckerberg. In the conversation, Zuckerberg explains how Facebook works to tech journalist David Pogue.
Here’s how he describes the poke feature:
There’s this feature called poking where you just go to someone’s profile and you can poke the person. And, like, what does that do? Nothing. It sends them a message — it’s like, “You’ve been poked.”And you know, like, who cares? I mean, it’s like, I thought about it when I was drunk or something. And people really like poking each other for some reason that I don’t think anyone can really explain.
Meanwhile, the poke is making a comeback.
Facebook made a design change to make the poke button more visible; it was previously hidden away and nearly impossible to locate. It also makes it easy to locate the page where all of your pokes live (search “pokes” on Facebook).
As a result, poking increased 13-fold in a short period, primarily among younger Gen Z users who were unlikely to have been on Facebook when the poke initially became popular.