Yubo: Creating a fun, safe space where everyone’s welcome with Google Cloud
About Yubo
Based in Paris, Yubo is a social media app with 45 million users worldwide that helps young people make new friends in a safe, secure environment using livestreams, games, and chat.
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Contact usYubo develops its social media app using Google Cloud to scale faster, support its security measures, and develop its livestreaming capacity so that more young people can make new friends safely.
Google Cloud results
- Protects the privacy of users by analyzing profile media livestreams in non-intrusive ways, with help from Cloud Vision API
- Scales automatically to support 45 million users worldwide with Cloud Bigtable
- Offers a steady, high-quality user experience with Google Kubernetes Engine managed services
Runs and monitors 130,000 livestreams every day
While social media has redefined how we interact with friends and make new ones, both online and IRL, so too are modern notions of friendship redefining social media itself. With 74% of Generation Z spending its free time online, their search for more authentic online experiences is growing. That’s what’s driving the success of Yubo, a new social media app for a new generation.
Founded in Paris, France, in 2015 by Sacha Lazimi, Arthur Patora, and Jérémie Aouate, Yubo began life as a small startup named Yellow. Its development into today’s flourishing social media app was driven by a key early insight, says Arthur Patora, now CTO at Yubo, “We realized through our research that there were a lot of young people posting their Snapchat usernames online, wanting not only to reconnect with people they know but to make new friends. So we knew there could be a market for a different kind of social network.”
“At the beginning, I was developing and managing the whole back end of our app. Although I’m still coding today, GKE managed services is what helps us to run our operations in a stable way as a small team.”
—Arthur Patora, co-founder and CTO, YuboBut the Yubo app doesn’t rely on the usual features of social media platforms, such as likes, views, and comments, to foster interactions. Instead, Yubo focuses on creating a safe space for 45 million users worldwide to meet new people through livestreaming. “We’re all about real-time interactions,” says Patora.
Meanwhile, Yubo’s culture has helped it develop innovations that set its livestreams apart in a crowded market. The Yubo team has always believed in fast iteration and keeping things simple. “It’s very important for us to move fast because we really try to make sure that when we have an idea, we act on it by keeping it simple and testing it quickly. This kind of agility is a key part of our culture,” explains Patora. If the team deploys a new technology, they’ll use it on a small piece of their architecture first. If it works, then they keep using it. That’s how Yubo operates in an agile, iterative way, leveraging the flexibility of its infrastructure, of which Google Cloud has been a key part of since Yubo’s very beginning.
“For every user, we want to offer very high levels of quality during a livestream, with low latency and no crashes, and this is what having a distributed architecture managed by GKE truly helps us achieve.”
—Arthur Patora, co-founder and CTO, YuboKeeping 130,000 daily livestreams running smoothly
In the early days of Yubo, the team turned to Google Cloud to help it develop its new app. Originally, the choice was a simple economic decision, but the Yubo team quickly discovered how leveraging Google Cloud could help support the technological demands of their ambitions.
“We started out on App Engine, which worked well. But as we grew, we shifted over to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to ease our operational workload,” says Patora. “At the beginning, I was developing and managing the whole back end of our app. Although I’m still coding today, GKE managed services is what helps us to run our operations in a stable way as a small team,” Patora explains.
Yubo uses GKE to stay on top of the technological demands of a platform whose users interact with 130,000 different livestreams every day, all around the world, causing big spikes in traffic at different times. “For every user, we want to offer very high levels of quality during a livestream, with low latency and no crashes, and this is what having a distributed architecture managed by GKE truly helps us achieve,” says Patora. “We use GKE, as we have a lot of microservices and we want everything to be properly distributed and managed in real time. With this stack, we can continually build and improve services because if one service goes down, another one will not be affected.”
The Yubo team’s positive experience with GKE led it to explore more Google Cloud solutions, such as Cloud Bigtable, used for large analytical and operational workloads. The Yubo app uses “swipes” to help the user make friends and navigate the app. This posed its own set of technological challenges, as users wanted to make new friends, fast, generating new swipes by the second to be stored in the Yubo database.
“We needed very scalable storage to handle the data generated by each customer action within the Yubo app, such as swipes. It was really difficult to scale at the beginning because more users means more actions and more data, which needs to be stored, managed, and processed by us,” says Patora. “So we selected a fully managed, scalable database, Cloud Bigtable, for these workloads. I soon noticed that the latency was much better, which means that our users were getting the desired response to their swipe immediately on the screen. This is crucial to the user experience and, therefore, to our success.”
Creating a safe space for Gen Z with Google Kubernetes Engine
But while keeping the Yubo app running smoothly is vital, another important factor in Yubo’s success is the strength of its safety and security measures. With 96% of its users aged between 13 and 19, caring for their privacy and security is a priority of the Yubo team. “For us it’s really, really important to make Yubo a safe place for young people to meet and interact online,” says Patora, “There are three pillars to making sure our users are safe: prevention, detection, and moderation. GKE is integral in making sure those three pillars remain sturdy.”
Although enabling unique livestream features with a focus on supporting real-time interactions is what differentiates Yubo from other social media platforms, it also poses its own unique security challenges for the Yubo team responsible for ensuring the privacy and security of its users. For example, how to monitor real-time interactions to ensure no privacy rights are being violated, while also empowering users to express themselves freely? To answer this question and strengthen its security practices, the Yubo team has developed a security system that combines both human safety specialists and smart algorithms built on top of GKE.
“GKE allows us to moderate livestreams in a non-intrusive way,” explains Patora. “Screenshots of livestreams are captured every two seconds and then processed by different algorithms that allow us to identify very specific things within the messages, such as mail that a user might be accidentally including in the frame but which might contain their home address, for example. Once we are sure that it’s an image we need to moderate, we will get our safety specialists to either shut down the livestream or go into the stream and investigate further.” Yubo’s safety specialists are on the clock 24/7, all around the world, and this combination of human interaction and intuitive technology helps ensure that Yubo remains a safe space for users. The creation of this system was a positive experience for the team, as Patora explains, “It was a nice system to build, and it’s a perfect example of what you can do by combining humans and smart technology.”
Meanwhile, Cloud Vision has also helped Yubo strengthen its security practices. It helps the team track whether a new user on the Yubo app has uploaded their photo onto Google before to identify fake profiles. “We want to make sure that all our users are verified and have their real photo on the app, so our users don’t risk exposing themselves to fake profiles. Cloud Vision API helps us do this.” says Patora.
Yubo’s ongoing commitment to safety and security is essential, as its success continues to grow across North America and Europe. And this is just the beginning for the Yubo team.
“Today we’re really happy using Google Kubernetes Engine and Bigtable. We’re growing fast, and we know that Google Cloud moves fast with us to support our growth and the wellbeing of our users.”
—Arthur Patora, co-founder and CTO, YuboMaking a billion new friends
Yubo’s ambition is to become a global app with a billion users, and it’s on its way to achieving it, with over $60 million raised from investors and $17 million generated from its own revenue streams by early 2021. And the Yubo team will keep creating the tech to support those ambitions. “For the next few years, I want to build features that follow our vision of helping more people make new friends in a safe space,” says Patora.
Google Cloud will be an integral part of this vision, too. “Today we’re really happy using Google Kubernetes Engine and Bigtable.” says Patora. “We’re growing fast, and we know that Google Cloud moves fast with us to support our growth and the wellbeing of our users.”
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About Yubo
Based in Paris, Yubo is a social media app with 45 million users worldwide that helps young people make new friends in a safe, secure environment using livestreams, games, and chat.