Hearts on Twitter
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
I agree that this is going to be an issue going forward.
Hearts work well for things like family photos and cats--the traditional strengths of Facebook. But Twitter's point of differentiation was always live, rapidly developing news. Conferences. Sharp commentary. Leaks. Announcements. A heart is just not the right symbol in these contexts.
Going for the broader market risks weakening the core use cases, which set the platform apart in the first place.
"Twitter DOES care about protests because it will actually make them lots of money" -> NOT CYNICAL AT ALL
I think switching from Favorite is a good thing, as favoriting feels just personal, whereas a 'like' or a 'heart' is a public vote of support/appreciation. I do agree, though, that 'heart' is odd, but I can't think of anything else better.
(Not saying that favs worked as acks either, I used them as bookmarks.)
Recently, Twitter quietly started relying on the HTTP Referrer field. That's OK, I guess, except they did nothing to inform their users about it, which is easy for them to check and report on specifically. Instead, they let their users get confused by generic messages when attempting to post, or change settings, trying all sorts of things. If you want to require HTTP referrer, you should know what that means, and why many may have it disabled.
It's also interesting to see the social media sites and the web converging on using the same types of icons. All because of the mobile platform and a certain apple OS, with the cog wheel and menu symbol.
Heart versus star: I think the heart miscommunicates the function. I can't identify with it anymore, as I don't tend to "heart things".
Also, they didn't just change the icon, they changed the color as well. The star was a weak yellow. The heart is a darker, burning red, and therefore sticks out more in contrast with the white.
Yes! It took me weeks to figure that one out. In three years without Referer that was only my second non-obvious error caused by that.
And then they started with the polls. You can create polls from twitter web, but you cannot answer one. You just see a tweet from somebody asking a question. Nothing else, no way to even see that it is a poll. Same in tweetdeck (which is also by twitter). Confusing strategy, at least for me.
AFAIK this is only a bug with FirefoxDev & IndexedDB. It should work in other browsers or in private mode, where IndexedDB is disabled.
Another could be: "Our users are being innovate and using our services in ways we didn't completely anticipate, therefore we are trying to let our products grow "organically" and will make changes that augment what our users appear to be doing."
But this is kind of 2 sides of the same coin.
But that's exactly how I use "favorite". It's really useful, whether it's a cute picture I want to share with someone later or something more informative. "Like" does nothing for me; I don't always want to imply approval by clicking that button.
A long press on Twitter's native [Android] app and selecting "Share via..." will allow you to easily/quickly save it to Evernote (or whatever similar service you may use).
Personally I don't buy this. I'm used to 'favourites' and 'bookmarks' being used interchangably by browsers, which reduces the approval implication of that term... and the heart symbol doesn't mean 'like' to me, it means 'love', so has a higher level of implied approval than in your comparison.
The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.
[1]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
"The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people."
It's still just one bit, right? How does it enable conveying a range of emotions?
Wow. Really?
The would make that much more clear to me, though of course, I have since learned how to use twitter properly (I hope).
Effectively it's like bookmarking everything and then using the keyboard to navigate among the bookmarks.
Normal bookmarks are still necessary if you need to record a set of multiple pages that meet some criteria.
This fails to work for those of us who regularly clear browser history (e.g on shutdown), or bookmark articles from blog sites, or maybe the random URL of a site we've never visited that we're saving for later.
What? Who _doesn't_ bookmark websites?
In Firefox: Shift+F2 --> 'screenshot --fullpage'
Firefox, Chrome, GMail, etc. also use stars for bookmarks.
Thankfully after today's change to hearts I feel much more comfortable to provide Twitter with more accurate interest metrics so that they might monetise my preferences more intelligently and thereby serve me ads more targeted to my needs.
EDIT: Oh fine, here's the /s
EDIT 2: Jeez, we don't do light hearted rambunctious rib-tickling round here then? Not even for such silly and transparent changes by a company desperately flapping around to improve it's monetisation? We do all see this is because of ads, right? This isn't for the users benefit, the thing works exactly the same way, Twitter just wants us to actually use it so they can get better data. That's worth a little jibe.
Maybe I over think things but, it was a bit confusing to me.
People associate the star icon with "bookmark" or "save for later" ala Chrome/Firefox/etc.
Then when they discover that it means "favorite" they basically don't use it because "favorite" is a singular thing, or at least an extremely strong emotion.
Of course this is just my opinion but I sort of liked how Twitter was more newsy and less friendsy. I would even prefer the star to be a bookmark but I suppose it doesn't scale down well (size wise).
[1]: http://www.engineerguy.com/white-papers/made-to-stick.htm (see chapter 5)
Like also carries a connotation over from Facebook – liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
Your favorites/likes have always been visible to other users. e.g. here are the likes of the Twitter account in your HN profile https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/favorites (interesting they've changed the text in the profiles to likes but the URL is still favorites).
[Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "will this happen on Twitter" and you're referring to someday filtering feeds...if that were to ever happen I imagine they would use this data regardless of what they call it]
Problem: "heart" can not express emotion that community wants to just share, it may not necessarily be likable. Example, Tweet about violence in Middle east. I want to just not give it a "heart" but some other emotion like "disgrace, shame" etc.
Idea: To solve this problem, I would say the real symbol should be "Star", instead of "heart, like" etc. "Star" means you want to buzz in with this article but not classify your emotion. What do you think?
Are you ... what?
First, The only black manager in product or engineering left after encountering tone-deaf collaboration in measuring and increasing diversity.
Second, They changed the star to a heart.
And yes, I realize that, technically, "over-and-out" is incorrect, it should be just "out".
It has the same problem as "Like".
As mentioned elsewhere if they were trying to get away from the positive connotations "Remember" would be a better name for it
1. Install uBlock Origin.
2. My Filters add: http://twitter.com ## .tweet[data-retweeter]
3. Enjoy a Twitter without retweets.
If you think the people you follow retweet bad stuff, you need to follow better people.
edit: I think the converse might be more accurate - if the people you follow retweet bad stuff, then the regular tweets probably aren't good either.
That's not a very good generalization - I have retweets turned off for many accounts I follow, some because I found I was interested in what they tweeted (so I wouldn't want to unfollow them) but less interested in what they retweet, but in most cases it's because I try to keep my feed relatively low-volume and some people are extremely liberal with their retweets so turning off retweets for those accounts keeps my feed more manageable.
I can't do it. There's so, so much shit. It's a constant storm of random "news" plus attempts at being clever. Retweets amplify this significantly.
And then Twitter's web UI make the entire thing unusable. Click an image? Lose your place in a stream. It's an embarrassingly bad UI that seems designed to toss me to locations that are anything but where I was reading.
What I'm curious about, though, is a far more general question that this brings to mind. How do you build a social network that sustains itself through community rather than advertising dollars? Is that even possible?
You could decentralize it and use end users bandwidth and storage to make it cheap to operate.
The crucial problem is the onboarding of users. Once you reach critical mass everything else is easy.
Reddit seems to spend more than it brings in in a year, if reports that it had $20 million in cash when Conde Nast spun them off and had $18 million in 2013 are true.(1) Reddit also has ads. It doesn't seem like Reddit gold is sufficient to keep a large site afloat.
(1) http://allthingsd.com/20130109/reddits-funding-round-is-for-...
I believe they are one of the few who understands there's a difference; it's unfortunate that most of the social media doesn't.
"The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones."
I don't really buy it. Many countries have stars in their flags/coats of arms. There's no such unified symbolism for hearts. For example Chinese pictogram for heart is 心.
And the meaning of stars on flags is definitely not "this is something I really like." It's not a clear symbol of anything.
Twitter does a weird thing where they crop the top and bottom of photos, requiring you to click it to see more of the image. For 140 character posts, somehow the twitter design has ended up as an cumbersome and cluttered webpage.
Interesting to think about how similar Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Ello are. Knowing how easily any user base can jump ship if one starts to go down, others are ready to pick up the deserters in a heartbeat.
Maybe twitter meant "it's a universal symbol that resonates across cultures which derive from the european middle ages"
I think Twitter is missing an opportunity here.
This would be like changing Retweet to Share.
Twitter has asked developers to update their apps to reflect the change, if you don't your app will be blocked, so, there's that.
If you're worried people might think you're endorsing tweets now, let me reassure you, people thought you were endorsing tweets before.
In most other social networks Sharing has the connotation that this will post the content to another social network, not propagate it within it. Sharing on Facebook is self-contained, but not always.
But I know, my point is that this is not a functional change, but a change in name and iconography that will affect behavior.
They wouldn't have changed it, if they didn't think it would change the behavior to be what they desire (more new users using it).
The problem: the money is in the high-active users, not in the noobs using Twitter for an hour and then moving along. And a significant chunk of said high-active users will depart from Twitter because, like FB, the users haven't been consulted in any way...
edit: If Twitter REALLY wanted to improve its experience, it should...
1) fix tab-navigation to work like text->submitbutton, not text->media->navigation->poll->submitbutton
2) only auto-complete with tab when the current word begins with an @. No, if I just type "example"<tab> I DO NOT want a random user with "example" in the name expanded.
3) in the Android app, when I'm scrolling 2h behind and rt'ing a kitten image, I DO NOT want to jump right to the top and have to scroll aaaallll the way down again.
I see that potential for ads in Moments.
I would guess Hearts will get tweaked in the future to behave in a way that will make them something of value to brands (at least, Twitter hopes).
Similar to brands spending money for Facebook Likes (and thus getting their logos in people's feeds), I see Hearts as a first move towards a similar feature/concept.
Personally I like this change (as it is now) because I've only ever used stars as a "like" button, knowing people on the other end see that in their timeline. It's a very useful social tool for acknowledgement.
People are complaining and/or celebrating this change over some notion that it changes what the action "says". For people who agree that it changes what you are saying, they seem to universally agree it's changing from "I bookmarked this" to "I endorse this".
Here's the thing: if they weren't meant as endorsements before, then why was the list of them public, and why were they called "favorites"? Since when does publicly marking something as a "favorite" translate to a neutral "I am expressing no opinion on this matter, merely marking it for later retrieval"?
Because I can guarantee you: whenever you star/favorite/like/whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-it-today a tweet/post/blog/picture/whatever-site-we're-on-today in a public way with notification back to the original poster, it always gets interpreted as interest/enjoyment/endorsement.
It's literally nothing more than changing the icon. Same button, different color. It does the same thing: make a public notice that you touched that button on that tweet. If you weren't using it for what it was meant for before, you can continue to use it against what it's meant for today.
You all are literally bike-shedding right now.
Clear as mud !
oh
Hearts on Instagram are broadcasted to my followers, Facebook likes as well. Is this also the case on Twitter now?
There's a difference between saving something for personal recollection and also broadcasting it.