Facebook is trying to make 'poking' cool again

Remember when you would “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, annoy them or just start a poke war? Well, Facebook is trying to bring back that experience with some small updates to the poking feature.

The company announced on Tuesday that it recently improved the platform’s suggestions on who to poke and also made made it easier to find the poking page through search. Plus, Facebook added the ability to poke a friend when you search for them on the social network.

Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking in the past month. Despite many of them not being around for the initial surge of poking, young users are starting to embrace the feature, as Facebook notes that more than 50% of pokes are coming from 18- to 29-year-olds.

Poking is one of Facebook’s oldest features, dating from the platform’s founding in 2004, but was tucked away in the navigation after it lost popularity. Facebook never defined what the idea behind poking was, and left it up to users’ interpretation, with some choosing to use it as a way to flirt.

Now, the company is resurfacing the feature around the social network’s 20th birthday and framing it as an easy way to say “hi” to a friend.

You might be thinking to yourself, I haven’t poked someone in over a decade, why would I do it now? Instead, ask yourself, why not?