Twitter Goes from Favoriting with Stars to Loving with Hearts – Not Everyone Pleased

This week Twitter removed it’s option to “Favorite” a Tweet with a star symbol, replacing it with a heart symbol to indicate a “Like” (shades of Facebook!), and not everybody hearts it.

As Twitter explained earlier this week, on the Twitter blog, “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.”

The old Twitter ‘Favorite’ star icon

Well, we’re not sure what tests Twitter is talking about, or where they tested it, or with whom, but a lot of people very much don’t love it.

Twitter’s new “Like” heart icon

In an informal survey done by Brigham Young University (BYU), they claim to have found that only 18% of Twitter users preferred the heart.

In fact, people don’t like it so much that there are even tutorials on how to get rid of it and replace it with something else!

And a Chrome extension app called Fav Forever to replace the new hearts with your favourite stars (pun intended).

So how about you? Do you like the new hearts, or prefer the original stars? Or, could you not gaf?

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Twitter Goes from Favoriting with Stars to Loving with Hearts - Not Everyone Pleased

Description

Twitter removed it's option to "Favorite" a Tweet with a star symbol, replacing it with a heart symbol to indicate a "Like", but not everybody hearts it.

Author

Anne P. Mitchell