Twitter is making quite a fundamental change today, it’s replacing the option to “Favorite” tweets with the option to “Like” them. Favorites were an easy way for users to show that they supported or acknowledged a tweet, some users (like me) use favorites to store tweets in a neat list that they would want to come back to at a later time. Favorites are now gone and are being replaced with likes which will be displayed in the apps and on the web by a small red heart icon. This change also applies to Vine, the six-second video sharing app owned by Twitter.
Twitter says that in its tests it found that people love hearts more than they love the stars that denote a tweet that has been favorited, “The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people,” says Akarshan Kumar, product manager at Twitter in a blog post today.
Hearts have already been present on Periscope, the company’s live-streaming application, so also in the interest of consistency it’s bringing them to Twitter and Vine, making the little red heart icons the common language for its global community.
Starting today users will begin to see hearts on Twitter for iOS and Android, TweetDeck, Twitter for Windows 10, Tweets embedded online as well as twitter.com. They will also be visible on the Vine and website, with support for Vine on Mac and iOS coming soon.
You can say a lot with a heart. Introducing a new way to show how you feel on Twitter: https://t.co/WKBEmORXNW pic.twitter.com/G4ZGe0rDTP
— Twitter (@twitter) November 3, 2015
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