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Tech

03rd Nov 2015

All of a sudden, you can no longer ‘favourite’ things on Twitter

A subtle yet significant change

Tony Cuddihy

Twitter no longer allows users to ‘favourite’ tweets, instead replacing the icon with a heart.

The social media site feels that the old gold star could be confusing to certain new users, so they’ve replaced with a new ‘like’ system.

“You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite,” Twitter, patronising its long-time users to within an inch of their lives, wrote in its announcement.

“The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones.

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“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.”

While it’s sad to think that people can fall in love with a function on a social media app, the timing of Twitter’s change is surprising given Facebook is trying to get away from a simple ‘Like’ button, creating a number of different symbols to express different emotions on posts.

For those who used to ‘favourite’ posts on Twitter simply as a reminder to read the content later – rather than expressing solidarity with that particular tweet – this is a completely unnecessary step.

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Topics:

Twitter