Twitter has overhauled the scenario of marking the tweets as your favorites. The way to express the gratitude towards the tweet by liking it or not liking it, changes the opinion of the post presenter and the other viewers or the same tweet. Twitter today has therefore changed the Star button with Heart button to let the users make it a ‘favorite’ post by liking it.
The new system with ‘likes’, also used by Facebook, offers a better way for users to express their views. Commenting on the change and putting forward his verdict, one user said, "Hearts? Really Twitter? Why not lollipops, or sugar drop fairies made of rainbow smiles, sparkles, and a generous dollop of dreams?" in response, another tweeted, "There are too many love hearts on Twitter now, I feel like I’m reading text messages between a 12 year old couple". Product manager Akarshan Kumar said in a blog post, "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". Twitter thus claimed to make the interface easier to use and understand for the users around the world. He further said the heart "is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures and time zones. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite. 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 heart symbol will now be featuring two apps as Twitter and Vine. Twitter being the social microblogging app had already used the heart symbol on Twitter’s Periscope livestream app. But it is now be supporting the short video app as Vine. The idea was in mind since months, but the key Twitter investor Chris Sacca suggested such a change in a June blog post, saying favorite was "too strong a word."
He wrote, "Favorite is a superlative. It implies a ranking. In the early days of Twitter many of us interpreted the word literally and only keep a few tweets in our favorites that were truly, well, our favorites. Today, many of my friends and I use the star as a ‘like’ button equivalent… However, the majority of users are baffled by favorites and they don’t end up using the star much, if at all." The polling result showed 88 per cent preferred ‘favorites’ and only 12 per cent ‘likes’, with some 28,000 users voting.
