Twitter made an extremely dramatic change today, apparently. Ever since 2006 and before today, if a user wanted to show support to another tweet in terms of its relevance or entertainment value but didn’t want to make any personal comments, they would just click on a star icon and that action was known as “favoriting.” According to the people involved with the social network, this could lead to some confusion, as “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite”, meaning that they might have been hesitant to use the favorite icon as they would reserve it to their literally favorite tweet. This concept might seem quite obvious, as people get to know more things and their old favorite things often get replaced by new favorite things, so the new change is a little hard to understand.
Still, the company changed the star icon for a pink heart icon and the action is now called “like”. This change is also present on the Twitter-owned service like Vine and Periscope, providing a more unified look. Apparently, people will use this function a little more with the new icon, as it is universally known in social networks like Tumblr or Instagram. Some users might already be used to this new icon and some others might not give it much thought. But there’s a reason why some users are complaining about this particular change, they claim that Twitter has lost this unique look that made it stand out from the rest.
For those users who are having a hard time clicking the new heart-shaped icon, the developer Reed Kavner has created a Chrome Extension called Fav Forever. Basically, it replaces that ugly new universal icon with the good old yellow star. It will even bring back the word Favorite above the friendly and beloved icon. There’s a huge drawback, though, there are some parts where you will still see that dreaded “like” word, but still it’s a nice approach. There are some platforms where the star can still be used, but those will probably get updated soon to keep up with Twitter guidelines.