Anyone who has used the missed call to communicate will be familiar with what Twitter's favourite button was capable of. The button, represented by a gold star, could be used in many different ways: to bookmark a tweet, to express approval, to remind oneself about something or just to react without having to actually type up a reply. On Tuesday, suddenly, the star was gone.


Twitter, which has been struggling to add new users and lost more than $132 million in the last quarter, replaced the golden star with something that might be more familiar to users of Instagram, Pinterest or Periscope: a red heart. The new button was also given a new name, turning it from a "favourite" into a "like". The company explained this in a blog post that made it clear that the aim was to go after new users.

"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. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite... The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones," the blog post said.

The new button comes with a nifty new animation, which is quite satisfying to activate, but its introduction could have a substantial change in the language of the social network. Stars carried with them a somewhat positive connotation, but not tremendously so. You could favourite things that you didn't entirely agree with and they also somewhat avoided the very thing that Facebook has been seeking to move away from with its new reactions, instead of just a simple like: being forced to "like" things that aren't so nice, like a sad post or news of a disaster. As can be expected from the network, its users were not the sort to hide their opinions.