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Twitter and Vine favourite button replaced with heart, not a fan favourite

3 Nov 2015

Twitter hearts

If you thought something looked amiss on Twitter or Vine, you’d best look at where the familiar ‘favourite’ star used to be and you’ll notice that it’s been replaced with a heart, and a lot of Twitter users aren’t happy.

Seasoned Twitter users would know that the favourite button has always been there as a means of just showing that, yes, you’ve read the tweet but you’re not bothered about retweeting it.

But now, in a blog post, Twitter’s product manager Akarshan Kumar explained that the company felt now was the time to get all lovey with the introduction of the heart.

And, just like Facebook, this heart will now simply be called a ‘like’, not long after Facebook decided it wanted to move away from likes by using Ireland and Spain as a testbed for its expanded reactions range.

“We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers,” Kumar said. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite.”

Using the heart isn’t exactly something new for Twitter given that it purchased the live-streaming app Periscope earlier this year, which uses hearts to show when a user is liking a livestream. The change has now been rolled out across Twitter on all platforms except Mac, and Vine is also set to introduce the heart on all platforms. But are Twitter users actually happy with the change? Based on the ‘change is bad’ reaction that happens after every new change to a service, some of these examples of the tweets being sent about the change should come as no surprise.

 

 

 

Hearts image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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