pokes

Pokes are light touches or nudges intended to attract attention or signal presence. The term is used in everyday social interaction as well as in technology and gaming.

In social media, a poke is a feature that allows one user to send a non-text notification to another to say hello or to elicit a reaction without a message. The feature was popular on early platforms, notably Facebook, during the 2000s. Some services removed pokes or replaced them with other interaction tools. Opinions on pokes vary; some view them as playful and unobtrusive, others as outdated or confusing.

In computing, a poke is a low-level operation that writes data to a specific memory address. It is used in firmware, device I/O, and certain programming environments. The counterpart is a read operation, sometimes called a peek in some contexts. Pokes are associated with direct memory manipulation and are typically used by developers and technical users rather than casual software consumers.

In other contexts, the term poke appears in gaming, hardware, and literary discourse as a general noun for a quick nudge, or as part of features designed to encourage user interaction or signaling. The concept likewise appears in discussions of computer architecture and historical programming, where poke operations illustrate fundamental methods of memory and device control.