I think this is a rather significant change.
Whereas before a favorite was the equivalent of a bookmark now it is more in line with the Facebook like or Instagram 'heart'.
This is a clear push for more engagement.
I personally like it. But I would still like to keep an option for bookmarking/read later (i.e. how I use the favorite button now).
Objectively, it is a little weird for Twitter to have its own bookmarking function, with a nice convenient list that you (or anyone) can refer to.
But that's exactly how I use "favorite". It's really useful, whether it's a cute picture I want to share with someone later or something more informative. "Like" does nothing for me; I don't always want to imply approval by clicking that button.
I use it the same way. But there have also been many times that I want to ACKNOWLEDGE that I enjoyed/liked/laughed at a tweet without polluting my favorites. A like button does just that.
However I don't like that they just switched the favorites over to likes. They should have added a new option and maybe hidden the favorite option a bit more (if it's that important to them).
Evernote (or similar) serves this function well, even better than a "favorite" because I can save/clip things from other sources. i.e. when I have time to read all the things I thought looked interesting I only need to to go Evernote, not to multiple sites.
A long press on Twitter's native [Android] app and selecting "Share via..." will allow you to easily/quickly save it to Evernote (or whatever similar service you may use).
The English word "favorite" implies approval every bit as much as "like" does. Plenty of people use "like" the way you use "favorite", indicating attention, not that your friend's cat's death is your "favorite" news of the day or that you "like" the news.
Perhaps, but the use of the "star" aligned with common usage on other sites to highlight something. And people often talked about "starring" tweets rather than "favoriting" tweets. If anything, it would have made more sense to change it from "favorite" to "star".
Sure, when speaking about the formal English language. In terms of social platforms, however, favorite and like have very different connotations. Favorite implies something far less common than a like. Most people think of a favorite as something they'd like to come back to, while no one really pays attention to every thing they've liked on FB or Instagram
Yes! Favorite has meaning beyond the literal for anyone who has been online for a few days. I fav to bookmark or give a simple thumbs up. Hearts break that meaning.
> The English word "favorite" implies approval every bit as much as "like" does
Personally I don't buy this. I'm used to 'favourites' and 'bookmarks' being used interchangably by browsers, which reduces the approval implication of that term... and the heart symbol doesn't mean 'like' to me, it means 'love', so has a higher level of implied approval than in your comparison.
There are a few services that work with Twitter to do this - Pocket comes to mind. I know their Chrome extension will place "Pocket" buttons on each tweet allowing you to save them for later. Similarly, a long button press on iOS will allow you to send a link from within Twitter to Pocket.
A lot of people use it as a way to get your attention without retweeting the post to their feed. I've started getting an increase in what seems to be automated favoriting (now liking), which is so incredibly annoying that I have to end up muting those users.
It's interesting to me because Facebook just made the news recently for saying they'd try to come up with something akin to dislike because the "like" is too positive a sentiment for many situations (death of a relative, bad day at work, whatever). In the wake of that, Twitter didn't say "well the favorite is already neutral of emotions, and is more akin to showing support for the thing, positive or negative". Instead, they said "oooh, we want the problem Facebook is facing".
I just woke up, and seeing the new page threw me off. It does completely change the sentiment, and evoke a completely different set of idea to see tiny hearts rather than generic impersonal 'fav'icons.
I disagree. It is wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can't be fixed by putting so much thought into an icon - the core engagement of it is slightly broken. Chris Sacca had a great article on what is wrong with Twitter [1]. TLDR: changing stars to hearts won't move then needle.
The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.
That's already been the way people have been using the favstar on twitter. The difference now is that it'll be obvious to more people that this is the main purpose of the feature. That plus now it'll be slightly different if you want to "favorite" something that is negative (the "like" problem).
I am sort of tired of the ole lets make it emotional to make it stick [1] tactic.
Of course this is just my opinion but I sort of liked how Twitter was more newsy and less friendsy. I would even prefer the star to be a bookmark but I suppose it doesn't scale down well (size wise).
If you click the link to the twitter username at the top of that article, you get to a page which still shows the favourites star rather than the full twitter feed with hearts
Honestly, it was for me when I started with twitter for real in 2010 (my account is from 2006, but I haven't really used it until 2010). It was unclear to me whether I should be using this as a kind of bookmark-feature as a help for me to remember tweets to get back to or whether this was a social signal I'd be sending to the author of the tweet.
The would make that much more clear to me, though of course, I have since learned how to use twitter properly (I hope).
Both Chrome and Firefox use a star icon as a shortcut to bookmark a page. I find it more surprising that you don't think people still bookmark websites. What do you use to remember links to pages you might want to visit again in the future?
You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.
Effectively it's like bookmarking everything and then using the keyboard to navigate among the bookmarks.
Normal bookmarks are still necessary if you need to record a set of multiple pages that meet some criteria.
>You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.
This fails to work for those of us who regularly clear browser history (e.g on shutdown), or bookmark articles from blog sites, or maybe the random URL of a site we've never visited that we're saving for later.
I used to, but the increasing amount of 404ing in my bookmark collection led me to stop trusting that I could get back to something with it. I think I'd prefer a "whole page snapshot" rather than a bookmark.
To prevent 404'ing an Archive service can be used. But I feel that is a little abusive to archive the page then bookmark the archive, so I take whole page screenshots. :)
I only bookmark a page when I want to add extra tags to find it by that don't appear in its URL or title. Otherwise, Firefox's "awesomebar" does an excellent job of finding what I want out of my history.
I have over 5K bookmarks, I mean I might be an exception but if a site has some interesting content/ideas I will bookmark it to its appropriate category folder.
I assume they have data to back that claim up. And I can understand it. Putting all the knowledge and assumptions you have as person who (presumably) uses Twitter and is generally tech-savvy: what would a person assume a "star" button does?
Oh yes! I needed to perform some quick maintenance on my phone just after my first use of twitter but I'd forgotten to close the app and it took 10 minutes to work out why I couldn't get my Torx screwdriver to undo all the little screws in the screen!
Thankfully after today's change to hearts I feel much more comfortable to provide Twitter with more accurate interest metrics so that they might monetise my preferences more intelligently and thereby serve me ads more targeted to my needs.
EDIT: Oh fine, here's the /s
EDIT 2: Jeez, we don't do light hearted rambunctious rib-tickling round here then? Not even for such silly and transparent changes by a company desperately flapping around to improve it's monetisation? We do all see this is because of ads, right? This isn't for the users benefit, the thing works exactly the same way, Twitter just wants us to actually use it so they can get better data. That's worth a little jibe.
It was confusing to me. "Wait... I'm favoriting it? What does that mean? I mean I like it but, why favorite the tweet? Will I want to come back to this tweet later? What's the point? Should I just retweet it? I don't like it that much that I want to RT it, and I don't want to spam my followers."
Maybe I over think things but, it was a bit confusing to me.
People associate the star icon with "bookmark" or "save for later" ala Chrome/Firefox/etc.
Then when they discover that it means "favorite" they basically don't use it because "favorite" is a singular thing, or at least an extremely strong emotion.
In the past, Twitter didn't send notifications to anyone about what you favorited. They do now, which is weird when trying to use it as a bookmarking tool.
I assume that’s in line with them adding the birthday field on user profiles. People used to Facebook will like more tweets than with the previous star/favorite system and thus provide more accurate data for ads.
My assumption on any changes Twitter makes is that it's powered by the hope of future ad revenue.
I see that potential for ads in Moments.
I would guess Hearts will get tweaked in the future to behave in a way that will make them something of value to brands (at least, Twitter hopes).
Similar to brands spending money for Facebook Likes (and thus getting their logos in people's feeds), I see Hearts as a first move towards a similar feature/concept.
Personally I like this change (as it is now) because I've only ever used stars as a "like" button, knowing people on the other end see that in their timeline. It's a very useful social tool for acknowledgement.
So now it's like Tumblr. Now they only need to remove 140-character limit and there will be no differences at all.
"The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones."
I don't really buy it. Many countries have stars in their flags/coats of arms. There's no such unified symbolism for hearts. For example Chinese pictogram for heart is 心.
Twitter does a weird thing where they crop the top and bottom of photos, requiring you to click it to see more of the image. For 140 character posts, somehow the twitter design has ended up as an cumbersome and cluttered webpage.
Interesting to think about how similar Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Ello are. Knowing how easily any user base can jump ship if one starts to go down, others are ready to pick up the deserters in a heartbeat.
If there's anything anthropology has taught us, it's that the claim "X is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones" is almost certainly not the case. There are languages without nouns, languages with only two colors, languages with no tenses to differentiate time, etc.
Maybe twitter meant "it's a universal symbol that resonates across cultures which derive from the european middle ages"
TLDR + Sarcasm: "Today we made twitter a little bit more like facebook, because lets face it, some people are confused by stars and the word favorite."
I'm glad they're focusing on fixing major problems such as newcomers finding the functionality of the favorite button confusing, instead of trying to find new ways to deal with abuse on Twitter.
I don't use Twitter, but this sounds more confusing now. Stars are used throughout other services or systems for favoriting something such as bookmarks and if I "star it", I can revisit it in the future. But that means only I can see it.
Hearts on Instagram are broadcasted to my followers, Facebook likes as well. Is this also the case on Twitter now?
There's a difference between saving something for personal recollection and also broadcasting it.
Favourite was the generic thing for acknowledging a post whether you like it, relate to it, or whatever...so now if someone has bad news (eg. someone dies) what do you do? 'like it'?
Not long before Twitter will blend in with Failbook and Instagram. A pity, but apparently neccessary as Twitter needs fresh cash.
The problem: the money is in the high-active users, not in the noobs using Twitter for an hour and then moving along. And a significant chunk of said high-active users will depart from Twitter because, like FB, the users haven't been consulted in any way...
edit: If Twitter REALLY wanted to improve its experience, it should...
1) fix tab-navigation to work like text->submitbutton, not text->media->navigation->poll->submitbutton
2) only auto-complete with tab when the current word begins with an @. No, if I just type "example"<tab> I DO NOT want a random user with "example" in the name expanded.
3) in the Android app, when I'm scrolling 2h behind and rt'ing a kitten image, I DO NOT want to jump right to the top and have to scroll aaaallll the way down again.
I've seen them testing this and the icon style changes for months now, having had three different test screens spread over three different accounts. On mobile.
I'm bummed. I used stars as a "save-for-later" feature. I like the idea of having the option to explicitly endorse something you like, but I will miss the bookmark functionality. Even Facebook has a "save" feature (a little hidden in a menu, but that's ok for me) and they seem to use it effectively for engagement purposes.
If it were that simple, they wouldn't write a post about their justification for choosing a heart over a star, and changing it from favorite to like. They expect the underlying behavior/use to change, or they wouldn't have bothered making such a significant change to a core feature.
But is that stopping YOU from behaving like that if you know it's literally just a change of icon? And if the change of icon bothers people that much, just install Tweetdeck. It's still a star in there (much like other inconsistencies across Twitter's apps/platforms).
Yes, it's likely to change my behavior because the change is so visible it makes me think about it, and the best interaction is one I don't have to think about.
Twitter has asked developers to update their apps to reflect the change, if you don't your app will be blocked, so, there's that.
So you are thinking about it right now. You haven't come to a decision yet on how your behavior would change? Why would you need to completely reconsider this every time you click the button?
If you're worried people might think you're endorsing tweets now, let me reassure you, people thought you were endorsing tweets before.
In most other social networks Sharing has the connotation that this will post the content to another social network, not propagate it within it. Sharing on Facebook is self-contained, but not always.
But I know, my point is that this is not a functional change, but a change in name and iconography that will affect behavior.
They wouldn't have changed it, if they didn't think it would change the behavior to be what they desire (more new users using it).
Well… duh. But, the thing is, I also want the reaction functionality. If somebody makes an hilarious comment I want her to know that I deeply appreciate his wit. But if somebody posts a long article about cats and I want to read it later I want to just bookmark it. See, I don't know if I like it because I haven't read it.
A heart conveys much more emotion than "like" or "favorite" – it's just an emoji, but still, it seems significant enough to me that I'll do less liking on Twitter.
Like also carries a connotation over from Facebook – liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
> liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
Your favorites/likes have always been visible to other users. e.g. here are the likes of the Twitter account in your HN profile https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/favorites (interesting they've changed the text in the profiles to likes but the URL is still favorites).
[Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "will this happen on Twitter" and you're referring to someday filtering feeds...if that were to ever happen I imagine they would use this data regardless of what they call it]
Being visible and being a persistent measure of preference is different. Twitter is very ephemeral and my worry is that this will imply less ephemerality. It's an irrational worry.
180 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadBut that's exactly how I use "favorite". It's really useful, whether it's a cute picture I want to share with someone later or something more informative. "Like" does nothing for me; I don't always want to imply approval by clicking that button.
A long press on Twitter's native [Android] app and selecting "Share via..." will allow you to easily/quickly save it to Evernote (or whatever similar service you may use).
Personally I don't buy this. I'm used to 'favourites' and 'bookmarks' being used interchangably by browsers, which reduces the approval implication of that term... and the heart symbol doesn't mean 'like' to me, it means 'love', so has a higher level of implied approval than in your comparison.
The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.
[1]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
Of course this is just my opinion but I sort of liked how Twitter was more newsy and less friendsy. I would even prefer the star to be a bookmark but I suppose it doesn't scale down well (size wise).
[1]: http://www.engineerguy.com/white-papers/made-to-stick.htm (see chapter 5)
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=akik
Wow. Really?
The would make that much more clear to me, though of course, I have since learned how to use twitter properly (I hope).
Effectively it's like bookmarking everything and then using the keyboard to navigate among the bookmarks.
Normal bookmarks are still necessary if you need to record a set of multiple pages that meet some criteria.
This fails to work for those of us who regularly clear browser history (e.g on shutdown), or bookmark articles from blog sites, or maybe the random URL of a site we've never visited that we're saving for later.
What? Who _doesn't_ bookmark websites?
In Firefox: Shift+F2 --> 'screenshot --fullpage'
Firefox, Chrome, GMail, etc. also use stars for bookmarks.
Thankfully after today's change to hearts I feel much more comfortable to provide Twitter with more accurate interest metrics so that they might monetise my preferences more intelligently and thereby serve me ads more targeted to my needs.
EDIT: Oh fine, here's the /s
EDIT 2: Jeez, we don't do light hearted rambunctious rib-tickling round here then? Not even for such silly and transparent changes by a company desperately flapping around to improve it's monetisation? We do all see this is because of ads, right? This isn't for the users benefit, the thing works exactly the same way, Twitter just wants us to actually use it so they can get better data. That's worth a little jibe.
Maybe I over think things but, it was a bit confusing to me.
People associate the star icon with "bookmark" or "save for later" ala Chrome/Firefox/etc.
Then when they discover that it means "favorite" they basically don't use it because "favorite" is a singular thing, or at least an extremely strong emotion.
And yes, I realize that, technically, "over-and-out" is incorrect, it should be just "out".
I see that potential for ads in Moments.
I would guess Hearts will get tweaked in the future to behave in a way that will make them something of value to brands (at least, Twitter hopes).
Similar to brands spending money for Facebook Likes (and thus getting their logos in people's feeds), I see Hearts as a first move towards a similar feature/concept.
Personally I like this change (as it is now) because I've only ever used stars as a "like" button, knowing people on the other end see that in their timeline. It's a very useful social tool for acknowledgement.
"The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones."
I don't really buy it. Many countries have stars in their flags/coats of arms. There's no such unified symbolism for hearts. For example Chinese pictogram for heart is 心.
And the meaning of stars on flags is definitely not "this is something I really like." It's not a clear symbol of anything.
Twitter does a weird thing where they crop the top and bottom of photos, requiring you to click it to see more of the image. For 140 character posts, somehow the twitter design has ended up as an cumbersome and cluttered webpage.
Interesting to think about how similar Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Ello are. Knowing how easily any user base can jump ship if one starts to go down, others are ready to pick up the deserters in a heartbeat.
Maybe twitter meant "it's a universal symbol that resonates across cultures which derive from the european middle ages"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_(symbol)
Hearts on Instagram are broadcasted to my followers, Facebook likes as well. Is this also the case on Twitter now?
There's a difference between saving something for personal recollection and also broadcasting it.
https://twitter.com/gruber/favorites
The problem: the money is in the high-active users, not in the noobs using Twitter for an hour and then moving along. And a significant chunk of said high-active users will depart from Twitter because, like FB, the users haven't been consulted in any way...
edit: If Twitter REALLY wanted to improve its experience, it should...
1) fix tab-navigation to work like text->submitbutton, not text->media->navigation->poll->submitbutton
2) only auto-complete with tab when the current word begins with an @. No, if I just type "example"<tab> I DO NOT want a random user with "example" in the name expanded.
3) in the Android app, when I'm scrolling 2h behind and rt'ing a kitten image, I DO NOT want to jump right to the top and have to scroll aaaallll the way down again.
I think Twitter is missing an opportunity here.
This would be like changing Retweet to Share.
Twitter has asked developers to update their apps to reflect the change, if you don't your app will be blocked, so, there's that.
If you're worried people might think you're endorsing tweets now, let me reassure you, people thought you were endorsing tweets before.
In most other social networks Sharing has the connotation that this will post the content to another social network, not propagate it within it. Sharing on Facebook is self-contained, but not always.
But I know, my point is that this is not a functional change, but a change in name and iconography that will affect behavior.
They wouldn't have changed it, if they didn't think it would change the behavior to be what they desire (more new users using it).
Like also carries a connotation over from Facebook – liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
Your favorites/likes have always been visible to other users. e.g. here are the likes of the Twitter account in your HN profile https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/favorites (interesting they've changed the text in the profiles to likes but the URL is still favorites).
[Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "will this happen on Twitter" and you're referring to someday filtering feeds...if that were to ever happen I imagine they would use this data regardless of what they call it]