San Francisco-based Twitter is replacing its long-time star icon with a heart as the new way to express that someone favors a tweet.
We hope you like what you see on Twitter and Vine today: hearts!, Akarshan Kumar, a Twitter product manager, stated in a post on the company s blog.
For years, Twitter members used a star symbol to favorite a tweet.
The social blogging network is also changing the meaning of the symbol.
We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we ll be calling them likes, Kumar wrote on the Twitter blog.
Menlo Park-based Facebook, if this sounds familiar, has long used likes to enable people to show support for a post or status update.
We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers, Kumar said.
The company noted on the blog post that people might like a lot of things, but not everything was a favorite.
The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones, Kumar wrote.
Twitter is under increasing pressure to widen its user base as well as to generate more revenue from advertising, especially since Facebook s growth has been visibly robust. Twitter co-founder and one-time chief executive officer Jack Dorsey returned last month to the helm of Twitter, in a quest to revive the company s fortunes.
The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people, Kumar said in the blog post. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.
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