Facebook is to develop a ‘sympathise’ button to replace the ‘like’ button in certain situations.
Facebook is developing a ‘sympathise’ button as an alternative to the ‘like’ button.
If a user tags their status with a
negative emotion, then his or her friends will be able to ‘sympathise’
with the post rather than press the ‘like’ button.
Until now the ‘like’ button has proved to be unsuitable for use on gloomy occasions such as the death of a pet.
Bad news such as the changing of a
relationship status from ‘married’ to ‘divorced’ has also stretched the
limits of the feature.
The ‘sympathise’ button emerged at a
Facebook ‘hackathon’ event, where the company’s engineers come together
and brainstorm new ideas.
Many of the site’s most popular features such as the Timeline and even the ‘like’ button have emerged from past such events.
According to Dan Muriello, a software engineer at Facebook, the feature will not work for every post.
However, he said if a user tags a status
with certain emotions the result would be “five people sympathise with
this,” instead of “five people ‘like’ this”.
He said: “Which of course a lot of people were – and still are – very excited about.
“But we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product. Yet.”
Mr Muriello did not give a timeline for when the ‘sympathise’ button might be rolled out.
Facebook has long ruled out the idea of a
‘dislike’ button despite online campaigns by thousands of users on the
grounds that it is too negative.
A Facebook spokesman said that hackathons
are ‘the foundation for great innovation and thinking about how we can
better serve people around the world’.
He added: “Some of our best ideas come
from hackathons, and the many ideas that don’t get pursued often help us
think differently about how we can improve our service”.
Facebook is the largest social network in
the world with 1.19 billion users worldwide, of which 24 million are in
the UK, or almost half the population.
What's your take?
This has absolutely nothing to do with the price of garri in the market.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much. My thots exactly.lol
DeleteI would prefer the dislike button. So many things I would love to dislike on some people's profile.
ReplyDeleteWhat about the "ur a bloody liar" button. I would really love to use that. For example, 5 people think ur a bloody lair. There are a whole lot of liars on facebook.
ReplyDelete