Speakiesy: A Yik Yak alternative that trades gossip for news
By Jee Young Lee
7:05 p.m. Nov. 2 2015
After Yik Yak swept Northwestern last year, Speakiesy, a social media app with functions similar to Yik Yak save for the anonymity, has set foot on campus. The app is strictly limited to NU students, allowing them to share text, photos and videos with their peers without worrying about the eyes of family members or future employers.
Speakiesy was launched by MOKO Social Media in September 2014, offering services to more than 100 universities since then. The app's title promotes the message that students should be able to speak freely. It also alludes to the speakeasies that existed during prohibition in the 1920s, said Anthony Casazza, a marketing operations coordinator of Speakiesy.
Photo by Jee Young Lee
“You should be able to speak freely and not have to worry about what people are saying,” Casazza said. “At the end of the day, we want to provide a safe environment for students to enjoy themselves with it.”
“Unlock your campus,” Speakiesy’s tag line, highlights its main purpose of publicizing news, events and everyday stories on campus. After users activate their accounts through their NU emails, they can see and put out whatever they wish. They can delete their own posts, but the app also deletes them voluntarily 90 days after they’re posted.
Unlike Facebook, where users can view content from a broad spectrum of acquaintances, friends and families, and Instagram, on which it is challenging to find campus-specific content, Speakiesy helps narrow in on the kinds of people and content that users want to see on their social media platforms, Casazza said.
Having garnered an increasing number of users on campus since its launch on Sept. 26, Speakiesy aims to partner with Greek organizations and help them raise money. Recently, it sponsored Delta Gamma sorority’s anchor bowl, with MOKO Social Media. The company donated money to Delta Gamma’s philanthropy, Service for Sight, for every user posting on Speakiesy.
“The majority of the work now is to spread the word through different organizations,” said Olivia Rangaswami, a Weinberg sophomore and one of the campus founders.
Photo by Jee Young Lee
Although Speakiesy stands to compete with Yik Yak, it will have its own place as more of a news source for official announcements of campus events, Rangaswami said.
“I think they’ll leave Yik Yak for gossipy, rumor-y kinds of things,” she said.
Some potential uses of the app on campus include advertising events, voting for homecoming king and queen, and spreading the news that there is a celebrity on campus, Rangaswami said (#tbt Ariana Grande).
Rangaswami says the biggest challenge Speakiesy currently faces is spreading the word and increasing the number of users, so that when new users download the app, there are posts they can view. Absence of anonymity, which can be a distinguishing feature that might win users over Yik Yak, also raises concerns for those who are not comfortable with having their names out in the public, she said.
She also said the process of uploading videos can be improved. Right now, users can’t upload videos directly from their phones, but rather have to record the videos through the Speakiesy app.
The Speakiesy team at MOKO Social Media is working to improve the app with updates, Casazza said, including a recent animation feature that adds a smooth touch while users refresh their newsfeed.
“We want Speakiesy to be the app that, when you wake up in the morning, rather than reading Yik Yak and checking Snapchat, we want Speakiesy to be that app you go to,” Casazza said. “That’s our goal.”
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