Official line
App no longer available.
Meta · Messaging · Feature
Poke
Discontinued
Feature
2012–2014 · 2 years in market
Launched
Dec 21, 2012
Discontinued
May 1, 2014
Cause of death
Lost to a competitor
Evidence
Unsourced
What was it?
Facebook’s first Snapchat clone. Ephemeral photos, forgotten in months.
Why it died
Editorial reading
Cloning Snapchat’s mechanic without Snapchat’s culture. Teens could tell.
Founder takeaway
Ephemerality is not a feature you copy. It is a social contract.
Sources
Unsourced — editorial reading
No primary source is attached yet. Treat the interpretation as editorial, not a citation.
What replaced it
Snap
Snapchat
The original stayed original.
Related graves
Same company, category, or cause of death.
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RIP
Bulletin
2021–2023 · 2 yrs
Facebook’s Substack competitor for journalists. Lasted about two years.
Media & Publishing/Lost to a competitor+28
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Lasso
2018–2020 · 2 yrs
Facebook’s TikTok clone that arrived late and left early. Reels was the actual response.
Video/Lost to a competitor+25
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Workplace
2016–2026 · 10 yrs
Facebook for companies. Lost the enterprise war to Slack and Teams; scheduled for shutdown.
Productivity/Lost to a competitor+6
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Facebook Hello
2015–2019 · 4 yrs
A caller-ID dialer app. The OS already owned the phone.
Messaging/Lost to a competitor+4