High
up in the stands, watching the Bears being pummeled by the Miami
Dolphins, we went to the Yik Yak.
If
you've never seen "The Perils of Gwendoline", with 1980's
Super-Star Tawny Kitaen, you
may wonder, "what is the Yik Yak"? If you've never seen
Whitesnake's "Here I go Again" you may
wonder, "who is Tawny Kitaen"?
The Perils of
Gwendoline, and Tawny Kitaen, are both ancient and history. But the
Yik Yak lives on.
Today's Yik Yak
is an app for your iOS and
Android that uses your location and lets you broadcast
whatever your little heart desires to everyone else on Yik Yak
within a 1.5 mile radius, anonymously.
Yik
Yak is an anonymous social media, different than PostSecret or Whisper because
you can only reach people within 1.5 miles. Clearly different than
Facebook or Twitter because the idea is to be anonymous instead of
popular. Being anonymous Yik Yak doesn't really seem social at all,
it seems more anti-social (and you haven't even read the Yaks yet).
But how do they keep you within 1.5 miles?
If
you open your iPhone and tap on the Compass you'll see your GPS
location at the bottom of the screen. No surprise, your phone knows
where it is. Yik Yak uses that location and builds a "geo-fence"
around you.
A
geo-fence can be dynamically generated in a radius around you or
any GPS location. It can be a established around a school, and used
with child location services to send you an email if your little
monkey wanders off campus, even tell you where they are. Cattle
Ranchers use this to be alerted when their cattle stray off their
property. Not that children and cattle are similar, at least not in
IQ or hygiene.
Yik Yak works like this, somebody can Yak, people nearby can
respond, and people can vote on the Yaks, all anonymously. Here are
some Yaks from my limited experience of one day:
-
One of my sexual fantasies is to f**k mr Watson. Bc what girl
doesn't.
-
to all the f**kers that smell like B.O. do you know what it's like
to sit next to you?
-
Omg you are such an idiot. Squirtle is so much better than Merill.
It
seems to me that Yik Yak has a following with high school kids like
"Texts From Last
Night" has a following with college kids:
-
I just opened a pickle jar stoned as f*ck. I clapped for myself. I
feel like wonder woman.
- Jager
makes that raccoon appear... The one that sh*ts in a basket in my
living room.
- Hypothetically
speaking, when I get a sugar glider would it be frowned upon to
bring it to classes with me in m pocket?
The
difference again is the geo-fence. With Texts From Last
Night you have people from somewhere else, like on distant
college campuses. With Yik Yak they're the people around you, at
Soldier Field, at work, at home, wherever you happen to be.
They are the girl down the street, or the boy at the bus stop, and
it can be a little disturbing.
I
have not tried Yik Yak near a college campus, yet. But I am near
Chicago's DePaul and UW Parkside often, and wonder just how
different they might be.
