Originally Posted by Seltzer

Actually, I think the concept of a facebook poke is kinda interesting. I had this Chinese friend who asked me what the English word was for the action of texting someone to sort of 'let them know you're alive'... as in, there's no real point to the text message and you don't even necessarily expect a reply because it's less substantial than a hello... I guess it's a bit like a social prod.

Apparently there's a Mandarin word for this, and the closest English equivalent I could think of was a facebook poke .