Twitter has a change of heart

In an effort to attract new users Twitter has replaced its favourite function with a heart ‘like’ button, much to the chagrin of some of its users.

It’s an effort to make the site a bit easier to use and more accessible for new users.

“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 product manager Akarshan Kumar says in a blog post.

“You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite.”

The change was rolled out on Wednesday and was met with predictable anger from Twitter users.

Much of the anger has centred on the use of the favourite to bookmark tweets to look at later, something that’s made a bit tricky by the more explicit approval implied with giving something a heart.

It also comes at an interesting time, as social networking rival Facebook looks to move away from having a binary response button, with the introduction of ‘emoji responses’.

That change stemmed from users struggling to know how to react to interesting content that they don’t necessarily ‘like’.

Never fear though, an enterprising person has already created a Chrome extension that brings back the favourite function.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise though that Twitter is banking on bringing in new users rather than catering to the needs and wants of those already on the platform, as New York Times writer Mike Isaac points out.

if twitter informed its product decisions by listening to all the complaining power users itd be a totally great product for like 500 people

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) November 3, 2015

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