We hope you like what you see on Twitter and Vine today: hearts!
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.
I don’t really know what is going on at Twitter. I assume with a giant like Twitter, this change “resonated / tested through the roof in focus groups” but the Favorite made sense. You star something to read later, give recognition and people could browse the things you favorited. I favorited all kinds of things. I know some people favorited my auto-tweets of new blog posts so they could read them later.
This is similar to what Instagram has but a heart? I don’t love everything I favorite. This seems like a change engineered to resonate with the Instagram / Emoji culture which I guess is where the ad dollars are.
I hope Tweetbot sticks with the star for now.
Update from Twitter’s Developer Blog:
In our tests, we found that people loved the new hearts, and we can’t wait for your viewers to love them as well.
I really want to know who they tested. I’m going to call my 14 year old sister and ask her if she completed a Twitter survey recently on Buzzfeed.
A lot of people, including me, have used “favorite” on Twitter both for marking tweets we liked/enjoyed, and as a sort of bookmark for tweets we simply want to refer to later. Using a red heart implies affection in a way that a star — or even a thumbs-up — do not.
This wouldn’t be a problem if Twitter were new, or, if Likes were a new feature that replaced Favorites. But that’s not what they’re doing — they’re renaming “Favorites” to “Likes”, which means every tweet you’ve favorited/starred in the last nine years is now liked/hearted instead.
Well Said. John Continues”
On their website, they’ve already put this in place. They have an effusive little animation that plays when you tap the heart button to like something. But there is no animation for when you tap the heart again to un-like something — like say setting it on fire or turning it to ice.
I just don’t know how this was a good idea.