Dear Twitter, No One Likes Your New Like Button
Care Bears Rejoice...
Today in another attempt to gain new users or merely to just piss off the old ones, Twitter changed its favorites button (that happened to be a star), to a like button (thats now being represented by a heart).
Why a heart? Well according to Twitter Product manager Akarshan Kumar "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."
Emotions, connections? So Twitter wants to be an iPhone commercial? Or at the very least more like Facebook. And that's Twitter's problem.
This year alone Twitter has rolled out a new quote system (that allows a person to have the full 140 characters to respond to a particular tweet) Moments (a newsfeed of sorts), and Highlights (basically a "Last time on Twitter, to catch you up on things) all in the name of making Twitter easier to understand aka Facebook.
But Twitter should be everything Facebook isn't. Facebook is a family picnic, whereas Twitter is a cool bar. Facebook is easy, everything is laid out for you and that's why our mother's are on Facebook liking and commenting on any and everything. Twitter isn't difficult but it's not exactly paint by numbers. It's not easy to tell someone just start tweeting basically talking to yourself, or don't be afraid to reply to a random tweet. There's a slight learning curve to Twitter but once you figure it out its magical like an iPhone.
The cool bar that is Twitter is a place for strangers and friends to meet and exchange ideas. Sometimes those ideas are so dumb and idiotic, that people favorited them so they can show their friends later on. That doesn't really work with a like. Likes come with a context, carried over from real life and Facebook from day one. When you like something you're endorsing it. You're stating to the world this person thinks like I think.
Meanwhile favoriting something was a little more ambiguous. Going through someone's favorite tweets you couldn't tell if they actually liked it out right, ironically or just thought this tweet was so dumb they wanted to be able to view it later and laugh.
Are "Likes" the end of the world, of course not. People will get use to it just like we've gotten use to viewing instagram links instead of pictures in the timeline. But it was one thing that didn't need to change and will probably do little in attracting new users to the platform.
Jon is a non-single father of none, who spends most of his time watching Netflix creating/editing podcasts and maintaining a decent nice guy to a**hole ratio.
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