After being a part of the team working on Yo! for almost a month I’ve had some time to dig into the inner workings and play with the app quite a bit. While we have a ton of really cool stuff coming out really soon, my favourite feature has to be how the app can track your data savings when you send messages, images, video and other content though our local hypernet instead of using the Internet like many other apps often do.
This feature is especially useful to people in the parts of the world where connectivity is expensive or non-existent. Think of cities where the density of people is very high making wireless connectivity in cafes and restaurants slow to a crawl, where infrastructure like mobile phone towers are slow or non-existent, and the cost of access means sharing and discovering content is a luxury few can afford. Think about how many messages, files, videos and pictures you share in a day with your friends. Now imagine — even here in Canada — how much extra you’d have left on your data cap if the majority of this was sent without using the Internet.
The next feature I’m most excited for in the short term is improved content and user discovery. In the current version of the app you can discover other people fairly easily but the content owner must initiate the send of content to you (the content consumer). Soon this will change so users can select which content they’d like to be automatically discoverable. This means anyone on the same Wi-Fi network or hypernet with you is able to automatically see the items you make discoverable. This feature combined with some of the excellent UI/UX work from the great team is really exciting.
Saju Abraham and I will be at the [Smart Mobility Summit](http://www.smartmobilitysummit.com/) at the end of the March in San Jose, so catch up with us there to find out more about what we’re working on.
Farther along, I’m even more excited about the networking side of things we’ve been building prototypes for. More on that later ☺