It’s no shock that people love the freedom to say whatever they want to a bunch of people they don’t know. I say this because lately we’ve seen a few apps that accomplish this goal. To go along with popular apps like Whisper and Secret, we’re now beginning to see another app rise up among the ranks. This app is called Yik Yak, and it’s taking the college population by storm. Yik Yak was created by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, two students from Furman University in South Carolina. The main goal of the app is to be able to anonymously say whatever you want and broadcast it to up to 10,000 fellow Yik Yak users. You have a 200 letter limit that you have to abide by. This app is free if you want to broadcast to up to 500 users. If you wish to broadcast to higher amounts of users, you need to pay a fee. For broadcasting to 1,000 people, it’ll cost you $.99. To broadcast to 2,500 users, you’ll have to pay $1.99 and to broadcast to 10,000 users you’ll have to pay $5.
The interface is pretty simple. You have five sections that you can scroll to. They consist of “new”, “hot”, “top in my area”, “all time greatest” and “my top yaks”. To post a Yak, you simply click on the small pencil and paper icon, type your Yak in the beige box, choose if you want to show your location, and then choose how many people you would like to share with. You have the option of 100, 250 and 500 before you see the paid option of 1,000 people. Once you’re done with that, you simply hit the send option and it gets sent to the users near you.
There are pros and cons of applications like Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper. One of the pros that I’ve seen while checking out Yik Yak is that there are a lot of really funny posts on it. A con that I’ve seen is that sometimes the posts can get pretty inappropriate, and the app has no way of stopping you from using a full name or any other information of that matter. The app does, however, have a way to remove posts if you or someone else feels they are inappropriate. If at least two people feel that the post is inappropriate, they can mark them as such, and the post will be taken down. Users can also screenshot inappropriate posts and send them to Yik Yak’s team via email to have them taken down. So far, this application has been downloaded over 10,000 times since it has been on the Play Store, and that number is growing every day. They have already begun to have companies take an interest in them. Atlanta Capital has invested $20,000 on them, but Yik Yak’s creators are focusing on gaining more users so that they can grow larger and beat out their competition. If you’re interested in checking out Yik Yak, it’s currently available in the Play Store for free.
