We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. 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. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.
The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.
In contrast, Sacca wrote, “If Twitter integrated a simple heart gesture into each Tweet, engagement across the entire service would explode. More of us would be getting loving feedback on our posts and that would directly encourage more posting and more frequent visits to Twitter.”
The ambiguity of the “favorite” button was not without its charm. It spawned a cottage industry of blog posts that attempted to explain what it was, how to use it, and what it might mean when someone uses it on you. Time’s Jessica Roy identified the “flirt fav,” the “hate fav,” and the “I agree with your ideology” fav, among others. Writing in The Wire, Rebecca Greenfield added to the list the “fist-bump favorite” and the “too hot to tweet” favorite. I covered a scientific paper in which researchers surveyed more than 600 Twitter users to come up with a definitive list of 25 types of favorites.
