It’s been a long time coming, but Facebook users will soon finally be able to express feelings other than “like” with the push of a button.
In a lengthy piece about Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, Bloomberg News adds a bit of additional information about the new options, though he and the company declined to give a specific date for when Reactions will roll out in the U.S. and the world. Cox simply noted that it’ll be “in the next few weeks.”
He adds that the data looks good and that users will like Reactions. At least, he thinks they will.
“We roll things out very carefully,” he says. “And that comes from a lot of lessons learned.”
In order to keep posts uncluttered, the usual thumbs-up button will appear underneath statuses, pictures, videos, etc., but if you’re on your smartphone, let’s say, and you press down on it a little longer, the other options reveal themselves. It will likely work similarly in the desktop version, perhaps by hovering over the “Like” button.
As we reported in October, there’s Like, Love, Haha, Yay, Wow, Sad, and Angry, which we already knew, and each one is animated to clarify their meaning.
Cox says the goal is to create a universal vocabulary that lets people express emotion as they scroll through their feed, and that its biggest test so far came during the terrorist attacks in Paris. Facebook users in test countries already had access to options other than like, and they used them.
“It just felt different to use Facebook that day,” Cox told Bloomberg.
Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button [Bloomberg]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist