I never understood the "bookmarking" feature that was favoriting. Hearts/likes/kudos are pretty universally accepted as a way of showing support without having to engage with a comment/response. This was long overdo IMO.
I think assuming it wasn't used as a bookmarking mechanism is being a bit shortsighted. Myself and many others in my circles used it as a bookmarking tool as well as to show support of something someone said.
It contains an interesting link you would want to read later? Pinboard can import favorited tweets and automatically store them as unread bookmarks, for example.
What, then, is your workflow for when you are reading through tweets, see someone you follow/respect post a url to an interesting article you'd like to read later? Or perhaps post a quote you'd like to use later?
Copy/paste the url into another tab, then bookmark it? Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.
> Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.
So, you favorite it, read the article later and then unfavorite? If you don't unfavorite, how do you differentiate between a bunch of links int he past week that you may/may not have read?
If I want to read something later, I add it to my "Read It Later" service of choice: Pocket.
I often would favorite tweets that I would like to reference later. An interesting article or a perspective on some event happening. I wouldn't go so far as to bookmark individual tweet pages, but clicking the favorite icon was an easy-enough way to ensure I'd be able to find what I was looking for later. Just load my favorites page and Ctrl+F.
This is true, but the meaning is completely different. I'm not going to "like" a tweet about, say, refugees being slaughtered, even if I might find the read interesting.
The problem is that favoriting has historically been associated with bookmarking. It is never really taken in the literal sense of the word online. Hearts/Likes does not work in so many situations. I won't heart something that is negative, but would have fav'd it as a bookmark. Heart/likes is only a marketing solution to go after new users. It's not the power users tool.
I always understood "favoriting" to be like "saving" a post in reddit. However, the digestabilibty of tweets are pretty much instantaneous so "saving" them is without merit. So I understood the genesis of "hearting" or "liking" to be very much so a re-branding of a highly adopted UI. Was this move organized before @jack came back to Twitter?
That's assuming the tweet is only text. I had used it to quickly bookmark links within tweets, but opening them and saving them to Instapaper honestly works better.
I actually come back to a lot of saved Reddit posts, particularly ones on programming subreddits where I can't easily read the article or mess with the code on my phone.
Well, that, and the fact that you have a huge number of people that are going to try it for a bit, and then forget about it. I'd like to see the numbers over the next six months.
People are already 'liking' things on Facebook and Instagram so it isn't as if people are unfamiliar and will forget to use it. Some people who used it as a bookmarking took might not use it anymore, but everyone else can now just transport the mentality of liking things to Twitter too.
This isn't the most useful statistical figure. The heart feature is novel — the increase could be due entirely to folks trying it out. A more meaningful figure would be to look at the folks who have constant favoriting habits (with stars that is) and see how their behavior changed. Personally, I'm more reluctant to heart tweets, as my Twitter account is mostly professional and it feels a bit unprofessional to "heart" a colleague's tweet.
"6% increase in likes" can mean a few things in the statistical sense.
* 6% increase compared to the same time last year?
* 6% increase in WoW favorite/like activity?
* 6% increase in the probability that a given user will favorite/tweet a given tweet?
Granted, in all cases, 6% is a lot at Twitter's scale, although depending on the metric used, it may not be proof that the change is unequivocally better.
I would assume that a good chunk of that initial increased activity has less to do with it being a better name/icon, and more to do with the increased awareness/attention to the feature in general, due to all of the press around the change... Will be more interesting to see the % of new users that make use of it after a few months.
Not sure if this is related to the Hawthorne effect, but I could easily see more traffic with liking just due to the fact that it's new and fancy. Maybe a significant number of people noticed the change and clicked the heart a few times just for fun.
Yes, would be interesting to see a comparison of new Twitter users before and after. Not that they only care about new users, but the data would be more pure at this stage.
It's promising anyway, considering the number of people who were internet-outraged at the time.
I agree with your assertion that the increase is at least in part due to the fact that the feature is new, but I think this would more aptly be classified as the novelty effect. [1]
Yeah, possibly. I saw an awful lot of favoriting immediately after the introduction seemingly meant as sort of a commentary on the change itself - explicitly favoriting to show support for favoriting. But either way, interesting to see if the trend continues.
I think there is definitely some of this at play. That being said, it is a totally sensible update to the semantics of twitter and I think still worthwhile.
> The reason? According to Weil, “It’s easier to understand.”
We aren't comparing apples to apples. It is a different button with different meaning.
The barrier to my "liking" something is substantially lower than my "favoriting" it. I understand both, but I'll do more of one than another.
The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value from more likes versus fewer favorites.
Are my interactions 6% more engaging? Does the quantity of interactions cover the decrease in quality of meaning?
Subjectively, I don't feel like it. Favorites had more meaning to me than Facebook likes precisely because there was a higher bar. They've diluted the meaning of a term and are, unsurprisingly, seeing people use it more often.
Am I the only person who hasn't changed how I use that button?? It's what I use to "mark" a tweet so I can easily come back and either read/refer to it later.
I think that approach to using the button fell out of favor a while ago. That is definitely how I used Twitter in the past, but now its more of a "read this, enjoyed it, didn't feel need to respond further"
Not, you're not the only person who uses it the same way. Indeed, it's incomprehensible to me that people would intentionally change how they use something that they know is functionally identical just because it has a different image and word associated with it. I can see how the change might have a more subtle, subconscious influence over the long term.
Suppose they renamed it to "Hate" and made the icon a skull or something, but kept the functionality the same. I bet you (and others) would use it differently, not only because of the psychological difference for you but also because of the difference in how other people will likely react to "voyou Hated this" rather than "voyou Liked this".
"Like" versus "Favorite" is a much smaller change, of course, as is "heart" versus "star" -- but they're still changes. Why shouldn't they have an effect?
Most people don't follow stuff like this very closely. Does the average person actually know it's functionally identical? I might not if I hadn't read about it here, at least not right away. If nothing else I would like something just to see what happens.
Most people don't realize that Liking on Tumblr bookmarks things in a list (a public list, unless you disable it!) either. Or that liking a conversation on Facebook causes you to follow it (people usually think you have to comment; "commenting to follow" is a very common phrase.)
Over time, social media platforms have effectively converged on the same basic set of verbs, with each verb doing everything all its parents did. But people still think of the verb as being the same one the platform started with, and limit their use to that use-case. I think it can be smart to switch from a "dialect" verb signifies to a "common loan-word" one, precisely to get people to take notice that the verb really has done more than they thought for a while now.
That's what I do. I don't care what the button says, it's a positive acknowledgment of the post and that's how I use it.
It's trickier with Facebook, and it might be the same with Twitter if I used it for personal interactions, because on Facebook I see a lot of "my family member died" and 'like' is not entirely appropriate for that.
I read that Marc Andreessen used favorites the same way to let the people who tweeted to him know that he read their tweets or check their product page etc.
The side effect of this behavior was that it sent a signal to the community that "Marc Andreessen" "Favorited" this page/product/tweet which could have surprising effect. I was at a receiving end of this and it brought a hoard of viewership/followers/favorites.
You've just described the difference between the two for me. Favouriting a tweet implied that I wanted to reference back to it later, whereas liking a tweet to me conveys that I don't really care to come back to it later but I want to show my appreciation for it without retweeting it.
They've only "diluted the meaning" if what they designed was different than facebook likes. Perhaps they just blew their chance to name the feature initially, and this is the correction.
I haven't noticed a difference, but I think it was a change they needed to make. Most tweets feel like they go nowhere and get nothing. For the average user, that can really impact the experience compared to an app like Instagram where they're bound to get a handful of encouraging responses.
But if Twitter have any sense, they'll do a lot more to encourage the feeling that a tweet has accomplished something, been seen by people, achieved something in the world.
I certainly noticed a difference in the frequency in which I 'like' things now. I find the animation really satisfying : ) It's like a little firework when you click the button.
Instagram is killing twitter when it comes to short-form public social profiles. Depending on the hash tags, you will get likes instantly for your photos. The narcissism and instant gratification can be very addicting.
With twitter, you either need a re-tweet, or a "favorite," which clearly doesn't work well because no one wants to "bookmark" tweets.
To me this looks like an attempt to grab some of the "slacktivism" clicking that Instagram and Facebook provide by copying the metaphor with the lower barrier to entry.
To the newest kids on the block (in the literal sense), Twitter could position itself as "Instagram for Text." If that makes any sense, and it catches traction, you could see instagram responding by allowing posts without pictures, etc.
The closer these networks get to each other with form and function, the fiercer the fight could be. Which in Twitter's case is a good thing because they've been losing.
At one point, they added the ability to see "Tweet Activity" but that could well have worked against them. Prior to tweet activity being visible, I assumed the majority of my followers saw each tweet. But even a tweet with miletone news and a few favourites shows that the tweet was seen by about a sixth of my followers - that's dismal.
All that does for me is increase the feeling that tweeting is near-worthless.
They need to make the time and social cost of interacting with a tweet as low as possible. Even something that's "less" than a heart. Always thought Instagram could do this by allowing liking where the identity of your like wasn't visible to anyone.
Interesting Twitter cheat related to this- if you go to ads.twitter.com and sign up with a credit card, you'll get a lot of new metrics exposed to you without ever actully having to spend any money. I have an abysmal "engagement" rate, but I know at least 50 people see every tweet I make.
Not sure this is what's needed. I see all of that (and more) on analytics.twitter.com when I click to view a tweet's activity, and I never signed up with a CC anywhere.
I disagree on a personal level. I used "favorites" almost exclusively to bookmark tweets and I have "unliked" all of my previous favorites because the meaning has drastically changed.
that rings alarm bells of contradiction in my mind; i always use the favorite to bookmark tweets - and i notice a lot of my followers do the same. of course i want to bookmark them for reading later.
And that action generally notifies the author who is then not sure whether you're showing appreciation or just checking link-bait.
I used to star to read later. I now open the link into a browser and get to it later on. And I use the star a lot less than I would hit the heart on Instagram - and Twitter know that's a serious problem for them.
I agree. Indeed there are 2 separate needs; bookmarking as a read later for tweets containing links (for more advanced users ) and liking for applauding for the crowd.. "for the crowd" will always win for "quarterly" reasons..
People do want to bookmark tweets. But Twitter reasoned (probably correctly) that people "like" a lot more tweets than they bookmark. Naturally, Twitter likes the idea of visible engagement, so they are encouraging people to do the lighterweight thing.
What's interesting is that I had already found my own behavior changing. For years I used 'favoriting' as bookmarking...but in the last year or so, I've changed and was already using it as a show of appreciation. I wonder if many other people were doing the same thing already.
There is actually very little difference in the functionality btw Twitter and Instagram. The real difference is in the "personalities" they have taken on by virtue of the people who use them.
People on instagram are looking for instant gratification (nothing wrong with that), so it will always win that battle. People on twitter are looking for news, controversy, protests, etc.
That's an important function for some people. But it does not have the same mass appeal, so can only scale to a certain degree. I don't see how they can solve that problem by adjusting the functionality.
Agreed. At a high level, its about users, engagement, and KPIs for the businesses. For instagram that's posts, follows, likes, and comments.
With Twitter, its tweets, follows, "favorites", and... @shouting, which is still a "tweet."
The problem with twitter is if I search for, say #occupywallstreet, I'm probably much less likely to bookmark it than I would "like" an instagram photo.
The difference ultimately lies in the fact that its about attracting investment - and twitter/(instagram/facebook) all share the same piece of that pie. So when you're posting KPIs for your business - they better look better than someone else's even though they are different "people/personalities."
The truth is all social networks are competing for the same influx of new users - those coming of age and interacting with social networks for the first time. Twitter isn't winning the minds of existing users with their hearts - they'll be looking at engagement and retention metrics for users that have joined 6 months from now, and never even knew you could once "favorite" a tweet.
I don't think instant gratification is all there's to it and I don't know why every discussion of Instagram needs to describe its users as narcissists.
I regularly use Instagram as a photo archive to look back on travels, places I've lived, things that happened last month, etc.
And the general effect from my timeline is that I keep being reminded of the health and happiness of my friends, which has nothing to do with narcissism or instant gratification, really.
Didn't say anything about it being narcissistic. I only meant to say that people use Instagram to see photos, which is something that appeals to everyone, myself included.
People use Twitter, on the other hand, to convey ideas, often highly academic or controversial -- doesn't have the same mass appeal.
> The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value from more likes versus fewer favorites.
I agree; the goal should be indeed improving the net positive contributions to people’s lives. I was happy to find out that there is some work directed at designing products for human values; see Tristan Harris's project, "Time Well Spent":
Or.... maybe the publicity from the change drew more people's attention to it. If they'd changed it to a moon instead of a star, maybe we'd see the same increase just due to people talking about it so much.
I was unable to "favorite" videos on youtube for a few months when they switched to the "thumbs up" for "liking" a video... took me a while to figure it out :/
A few years ago we build a website that had a ranking algorithm somewhat similar to reddit. Upvoting a post would put in your favorites. Many users told us that oftentimes they wanted to upvotes a post without putting it in their favs, so we split the behavior and introduced a new fav button in addition to the upvote button. This worked out remarkably well. People voted more without fear of polluting their favs. The overal ranking of posts worked way better with that.
I don't think that makes sense for twitter though, because "popular tweets" are not really substantial for the platform - and I actually like that about twitter. It's not so much a popularity contest as platforms are.
So, without the need for a strong ranking, I'm not sure if more likes are actually a good outcome. What do we gain from this, other than making it harder to find your (truly) favorite tweets again?
But I don't think being in the news has anything to do with it. Nobody who wasn't using Twitter before suddenly heard the announcement and went "Hearts? Finally! I fucking hate stars!"
Twitter's a global media platform, so it's hard to tell when the tail is wagging the dog. Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain that it's a 6% increase in this specific activity relative to all the other activity they track.
Speaking as one data point, for myself, "favoriting" something suggests I want to bookmark it for later use (which I often don't), but I also know plenty of people who utilize the star as a pseudo-like. I've tried that myself for a while, but it just felt wrong. Apparently most people don't share the same cognitive block.
I agree with tyre's assessment. "Liking" something is substantively different from "favoriting," at least for those of us who overthink its application or feel that marking something as a favorite has connotations beyond simply giving a nod to the person who posted. What this means is anyone's guess or even if it's going to matter in the long run.
Insignificant observation? Likely! But it's one more data point that agrees with a few others here.
But I will get over that, because Twitter is a very useful medium. This has nothing to with the success of Twitter as a business.
What I am interested in, is whether this is detectable from background noise of people using Twitter more because it is in the news. That is not the sort of thing that a TechCrunch puff piece is going to care about, and/or Twitter may have good reasons for not bothering to share the data. But I would like to know!
> What I am interested in, is whether this is detectable from background noise of people using Twitter more because it is in the news.
Probably not, or at least I'm sure there's some percentage of users who were oblivious to the fact they could "favorite" something. Now they know, and now they're using it (or were reminded?). That said, I'm sure there's also a non-trivial number of users who feel as I do.
I'm sure their UX folks entertained the idea of having both (liking via hearts + bookmarking via favorites) and decided it would be too disruptive to change at this point. I can't really blame them, but I do have to wonder: Are those use cases substantially different enough to warrant having both, or is the advantage of having a single "like" feature (fairly well understood, even across platforms--think Facebook) a more overriding concern with greater utility while maintaining simplicity?
It definitely sucks for people who were using favorites for what they were (or thought they were) intended only to have it changed up.
It did change my behavior. It's a heart, for things I'm emotional about (LEGO nostalgia) I'll heart a lot faster and a lot more. A fav was more a stretched bookmark used for non public sign of interest.
I think you're a minority. Be careful to remember most humans are not clever people with higher degrees, who (probably in your case) work in tech and pay close attention to these details.
I think his analysis is spot on, you're just the outlier ;)
I agree. I used "favorites" to bookmark something interesting, to be able to find the information if no time to read. But putting to favorite doesn't mean I like the content. I can favourite a tweet with a link to some bad news, such as shutting down a business, economy getting worse etc. I don't really "like" the tweet, it's just a interesting fact and I want to bookmark it as "favorite".
> Are my interactions 6% more engaging? Does the quantity of interactions cover the decrease in quality of meaning?
Yes, because the interaction is the same (both in consumer interaction and reward): you're clicking a button. The favorites button, through its monument, made people less likely to engage with posts they enjoy.
Agree, the name change does change the meaning. So it makes sense that more people are using it.
As a blogger, Twitter favorites/likes are, and always have been, meaningless. Facebook likes, on the other hand, do have actual value.
1. They contribute to a web page's share count that you see next to the social media buttons
2. They are factored into the Facebook algorithm, and make a post more likely to be shown
3. If I like something, FB will show it to some of my friends as if it were a share
One very simple thing Twitter could do is implement #1 and #3. If that did that alone, I would immediately allocate Twitter a much larger share of my ad spend.
I want to know if it is at the expense of retweets. I'll say what I thought before: Like vs. Retweet is now confusing (and I think detrimental to what Twitter probably wants which is retweets since those increase engagement). They should have renamed Retweet to like (people on other social networks expect likes to show up on their friend's feeds), and either dropped favorite altogether --or-- just make it a little bookmark icon! Like/Bookmark makes way more sense to me than Retweet/Like.
I'd be interested to see if this is just because it's new and novel or because of some sort of human psychological difference. The latter would be really interesting.
I'm happy for them but I fail to see how a '6% increase in like activity' will change the financial situation for twitter in any meaningful way, assuming that this is not just a momentary up-tick (which is fairly common after any change).
I think you're being a little cynical. On boarding a user is not mystical. You need them to begin using your product. And as they continue to use the product they develop habits. No use? No habit.
That use is called engagement. It's not a marketing term, it's a product term that's used in marketing.
Correlation != Causation. It's a highly visible change - users will be testing it out and in many cases it seems - making fun of it.
In my opinion the main (not only) reason it feels familiar to people is because of Facebook. Since when was it easier to understand the use of symbol for 'love' towards 140 characters of text than use the symbol for 'favourite'?
I've yet to see heart/fave/star/like buttons being context aware. I've heard anything from people using these mechanisms to read articles later, to using them as attention grabbing devices used to steal eyeball hours from distracted phone users, and everything in between. "Like" activity is a misleading metric and could mean anything because it's stripped and devoid of context.
is this really news? I find this an embarrassing headline to top this site. "Social Network X changes wording/icon on link, sees change of a few percent in some direction over the course of a week, trend may change direction at any time, we'll keep you posted"
6% is pathetic increase and stronger sign how little people engage on the platform.
The engagement ratio of Instagram to Twitter is several orders of magnitude off.
You look are Redbull on both platforms.
Twitter they have average of 40 retweets and 150 likes/faves, plus some replies.
Instagram they have 50-80k likes and 100 to 1k comments.
Even if twitter had 1000% increase that would not help the platform where there is so little active engagement.
6% is a pretty substantial increase for just changing the icon and name of the action. Hell it's a pretty substantial change in general for a feature that is presented so prominently.
Either way, how do you propose Twitter gets to Instagram volumes other than through lots of incremental changes? Instagram didn't get where it is today in one fell swoop.
Comparing Redbull on both platforms is pretty meaningless. There are other users who have way more followers/interaction on Twitter. Redbull has a brand that fits nicely with Instagram (photos of extreme athletes), while something like @BreakingNews makes tons more sense on Twitter.
They also post a few times a day on Twitter vs about daily on Instagram, so the interactions are split between more posts. Other users post many more times a day (most likely because they are posting text rather than photos/videos), so they have more posts to compete with.
Yes, but photos of extreme athletes is literally perfect for Instagram. They also advertise quite a bit which is how I see their posts on their. Twitter isn't a great venue for sharing epic photos, it's much better for current events.
They are pretty different platforms. Twitter is mainly read-only and they will not change that, ever. They should start being happy at what they have instead of mourning forever.
6% increase compared how? Week-over-week? Daily average? Gross average? How much does it fluctuate each week? How likely is a 6% difference on any other week? Has this been adjusted for variance?
I see nothing in this article other than two overly-verbose paragraphs summarizing a couple of tweets.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI often thought "This is a good tweet... but why should I favorite something on Twitter?!"
Copy/paste the url into another tab, then bookmark it? Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.
So, you favorite it, read the article later and then unfavorite? If you don't unfavorite, how do you differentiate between a bunch of links int he past week that you may/may not have read?
If I want to read something later, I add it to my "Read It Later" service of choice: Pocket.
Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I haven't read and feel bad about.
It used to be for me, too. Now I'm much more loose about marking something as read without reading it.
* 6% increase compared to the same time last year?
* 6% increase in WoW favorite/like activity?
* 6% increase in the probability that a given user will favorite/tweet a given tweet?
Granted, in all cases, 6% is a lot at Twitter's scale, although depending on the metric used, it may not be proof that the change is unequivocally better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
It's promising anyway, considering the number of people who were internet-outraged at the time.
Most probably it's more just simply the news media effect. And yes you are right, it's going to be more interesting if this stays up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect
We aren't comparing apples to apples. It is a different button with different meaning.
The barrier to my "liking" something is substantially lower than my "favoriting" it. I understand both, but I'll do more of one than another.
The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value from more likes versus fewer favorites.
Are my interactions 6% more engaging? Does the quantity of interactions cover the decrease in quality of meaning?
Subjectively, I don't feel like it. Favorites had more meaning to me than Facebook likes precisely because there was a higher bar. They've diluted the meaning of a term and are, unsurprisingly, seeing people use it more often.
"Like" versus "Favorite" is a much smaller change, of course, as is "heart" versus "star" -- but they're still changes. Why shouldn't they have an effect?
Over time, social media platforms have effectively converged on the same basic set of verbs, with each verb doing everything all its parents did. But people still think of the verb as being the same one the platform started with, and limit their use to that use-case. I think it can be smart to switch from a "dialect" verb signifies to a "common loan-word" one, precisely to get people to take notice that the verb really has done more than they thought for a while now.
It's trickier with Facebook, and it might be the same with Twitter if I used it for personal interactions, because on Facebook I see a lot of "my family member died" and 'like' is not entirely appropriate for that.
The side effect of this behavior was that it sent a signal to the community that "Marc Andreessen" "Favorited" this page/product/tweet which could have surprising effect. I was at a receiving end of this and it brought a hoard of viewership/followers/favorites.
But until I read the rest of your post, I wasn't sure which one you'd be using more.
But if Twitter have any sense, they'll do a lot more to encourage the feeling that a tweet has accomplished something, been seen by people, achieved something in the world.
Instagram is killing twitter when it comes to short-form public social profiles. Depending on the hash tags, you will get likes instantly for your photos. The narcissism and instant gratification can be very addicting.
With twitter, you either need a re-tweet, or a "favorite," which clearly doesn't work well because no one wants to "bookmark" tweets.
To me this looks like an attempt to grab some of the "slacktivism" clicking that Instagram and Facebook provide by copying the metaphor with the lower barrier to entry.
To the newest kids on the block (in the literal sense), Twitter could position itself as "Instagram for Text." If that makes any sense, and it catches traction, you could see instagram responding by allowing posts without pictures, etc.
The closer these networks get to each other with form and function, the fiercer the fight could be. Which in Twitter's case is a good thing because they've been losing.
All that does for me is increase the feeling that tweeting is near-worthless.
They need to make the time and social cost of interacting with a tweet as low as possible. Even something that's "less" than a heart. Always thought Instagram could do this by allowing liking where the identity of your like wasn't visible to anyone.
http://imgur.com/0vlXbmW.png
Unfortunately, I think they've tailored it for larger users and it does little to sway newcomers or even regulars with modest audiences.
What evidence supports this claim ?
I disagree on a personal level. I used "favorites" almost exclusively to bookmark tweets and I have "unliked" all of my previous favorites because the meaning has drastically changed.
that rings alarm bells of contradiction in my mind; i always use the favorite to bookmark tweets - and i notice a lot of my followers do the same. of course i want to bookmark them for reading later.
I used to star to read later. I now open the link into a browser and get to it later on. And I use the star a lot less than I would hit the heart on Instagram - and Twitter know that's a serious problem for them.
Now
People do want to bookmark tweets. But Twitter reasoned (probably correctly) that people "like" a lot more tweets than they bookmark. Naturally, Twitter likes the idea of visible engagement, so they are encouraging people to do the lighterweight thing.
What's interesting is that I had already found my own behavior changing. For years I used 'favoriting' as bookmarking...but in the last year or so, I've changed and was already using it as a show of appreciation. I wonder if many other people were doing the same thing already.
People on instagram are looking for instant gratification (nothing wrong with that), so it will always win that battle. People on twitter are looking for news, controversy, protests, etc.
That's an important function for some people. But it does not have the same mass appeal, so can only scale to a certain degree. I don't see how they can solve that problem by adjusting the functionality.
With Twitter, its tweets, follows, "favorites", and... @shouting, which is still a "tweet."
The problem with twitter is if I search for, say #occupywallstreet, I'm probably much less likely to bookmark it than I would "like" an instagram photo.
The difference ultimately lies in the fact that its about attracting investment - and twitter/(instagram/facebook) all share the same piece of that pie. So when you're posting KPIs for your business - they better look better than someone else's even though they are different "people/personalities."
The truth is all social networks are competing for the same influx of new users - those coming of age and interacting with social networks for the first time. Twitter isn't winning the minds of existing users with their hearts - they'll be looking at engagement and retention metrics for users that have joined 6 months from now, and never even knew you could once "favorite" a tweet.
I regularly use Instagram as a photo archive to look back on travels, places I've lived, things that happened last month, etc.
And the general effect from my timeline is that I keep being reminded of the health and happiness of my friends, which has nothing to do with narcissism or instant gratification, really.
People use Twitter, on the other hand, to convey ideas, often highly academic or controversial -- doesn't have the same mass appeal.
I agree; the goal should be indeed improving the net positive contributions to people’s lives. I was happy to find out that there is some work directed at designing products for human values; see Tristan Harris's project, "Time Well Spent":
http://timewellspent.io
I don't think that makes sense for twitter though, because "popular tweets" are not really substantial for the platform - and I actually like that about twitter. It's not so much a popularity contest as platforms are.
So, without the need for a strong ranking, I'm not sure if more likes are actually a good outcome. What do we gain from this, other than making it harder to find your (truly) favorite tweets again?
But I don't think being in the news has anything to do with it. Nobody who wasn't using Twitter before suddenly heard the announcement and went "Hearts? Finally! I fucking hate stars!"
Twitter's a global media platform, so it's hard to tell when the tail is wagging the dog. Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain that it's a 6% increase in this specific activity relative to all the other activity they track.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree with tyre's assessment. "Liking" something is substantively different from "favoriting," at least for those of us who overthink its application or feel that marking something as a favorite has connotations beyond simply giving a nod to the person who posted. What this means is anyone's guess or even if it's going to matter in the long run.
Insignificant observation? Likely! But it's one more data point that agrees with a few others here.
But I will get over that, because Twitter is a very useful medium. This has nothing to with the success of Twitter as a business.
What I am interested in, is whether this is detectable from background noise of people using Twitter more because it is in the news. That is not the sort of thing that a TechCrunch puff piece is going to care about, and/or Twitter may have good reasons for not bothering to share the data. But I would like to know!
Probably not, or at least I'm sure there's some percentage of users who were oblivious to the fact they could "favorite" something. Now they know, and now they're using it (or were reminded?). That said, I'm sure there's also a non-trivial number of users who feel as I do.
I'm sure their UX folks entertained the idea of having both (liking via hearts + bookmarking via favorites) and decided it would be too disruptive to change at this point. I can't really blame them, but I do have to wonder: Are those use cases substantially different enough to warrant having both, or is the advantage of having a single "like" feature (fairly well understood, even across platforms--think Facebook) a more overriding concern with greater utility while maintaining simplicity?
It definitely sucks for people who were using favorites for what they were (or thought they were) intended only to have it changed up.
I can't quite make sense of https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/661781723038912512 but it's quite clearly related to the (soviet-)star->heart transition over at twitter.
I think his analysis is spot on, you're just the outlier ;)
Yes, because the interaction is the same (both in consumer interaction and reward): you're clicking a button. The favorites button, through its monument, made people less likely to engage with posts they enjoy.
As a blogger, Twitter favorites/likes are, and always have been, meaningless. Facebook likes, on the other hand, do have actual value.
1. They contribute to a web page's share count that you see next to the social media buttons
2. They are factored into the Facebook algorithm, and make a post more likely to be shown
3. If I like something, FB will show it to some of my friends as if it were a share
One very simple thing Twitter could do is implement #1 and #3. If that did that alone, I would immediately allocate Twitter a much larger share of my ad spend.
Ultimately, six percent is a significant movement and it's certainly not a bad thing for the company.
"Engagement" seems to be one of those alternative metrics that companies point to when they're not making actual money.
That use is called engagement. It's not a marketing term, it's a product term that's used in marketing.
In my opinion the main (not only) reason it feels familiar to people is because of Facebook. Since when was it easier to understand the use of symbol for 'love' towards 140 characters of text than use the symbol for 'favourite'?
DON'T CHANGE THAT CHANNEL!!
The engagement ratio of Instagram to Twitter is several orders of magnitude off.
You look are Redbull on both platforms. Twitter they have average of 40 retweets and 150 likes/faves, plus some replies. Instagram they have 50-80k likes and 100 to 1k comments.
Even if twitter had 1000% increase that would not help the platform where there is so little active engagement.
Either way, how do you propose Twitter gets to Instagram volumes other than through lots of incremental changes? Instagram didn't get where it is today in one fell swoop.
Not all the way, but a team of 13 did pretty darn well in just two years--enough that it then caused Facebook to make an offer
I see nothing in this article other than two overly-verbose paragraphs summarizing a couple of tweets.
or people just a new icon and wanted to see what it did.