Yo, WhatsApp, Yik Yak?

Almost everyone on the planet knows what Facebook is. It’s been around for ten years, and recently recorded its 1.3 billionth user.

However, if you have teenagers, having a Facebook account and being able to distinguish between a tweet and the noise a bird makes is not enough. In fact, most teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead on Facebook – it’s for “old people”!

New social media sites are popping up almost every day, and some of the more popular ones for teenagers and twenty-somethings are not as well known. These include Snapchat, Vine, Wanelo, Kik, Ooovoo, Yik Yak, and WhatsApp.

One of the newest social networking services is Yo, The app. released on April 1 of this year, does nothing but send the word “Yo” to another person in your contact list. Nevertheless, over two million people have downloaded it, and it has received $2.5 million in funding.

​You might be asking yourself what this has to do with e-discovery. An article posted in July discussed the meteoritic rise of Yo and described how businesses plan to use the service to notify and connect with customers. Just as tweets posted from companies might be business records, so we may see Yo’s being considered discoverable in the not too distant future (which in social networking terms could be weeks or months rather than years).