Following so many years of Facebook users giving very loud support for the introduction of a “Dislike” button, the world’s biggest social network is finally adding their taste (in a way) to Facebook menu. Facebook has started of a fresh-hot feature called “Reactions”. This lets users show what they feel which would have not been adequately expressed by the famous Facebook “like” button (thumbs up). This Reaction include: “Love,” “Haha,” “Yay,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry,” and would only be available on the mobile version of Facebook by “long-pressing” or hovering over the “Like” button. Facebook has announced also that would soon be extending this feature to all its users though it didn’t divulge into details as to what time this expansion would hold.
You remember back in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the headlines when he gave a clue that Facebook was building efforts to expand its iconic Like button. This would be carried out by making the like button more encompassing for a wide range of emotions including sadness but not particularly including the much vaunted “dislike” feature. As such, this has manifested today into the “Reactions”; a feature presenting a fresh set of six emoji which will be presented in convoy of the original thumbs-up which would give users the function of responding with love, laughter, happiness, shock sadness and anger.
Off course, these set of emotions were not randomly selected as Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox reveals in a post introducing the new feature:
As you can see, it’s not a “dislike” button, though we hope it addresses the spirit of this request more broadly. We studied which comments and reactions are most commonly and universally expressed across Facebook, then worked to design an experience around them that was elegant and fun. Starting today Ireland and Spain can start loving, wow-ing, or expressing sympathy to posts on Facebook by hovering or long-pressing the Like button wherever they see it. We’ll use the feedback from this to improve the feature and hope to roll it out to everyone soon.
Cox followed this up by posting a video promoting the new feature.
The absence of the well anticipated “Dislike” button might seem like a let-down for those would had acclaimed for its introduction. Yet we can’t deny that the move shows that the one-way “Like” button is sufficiently inadequate to take on yen role of expressing the wide range of emotions people want to express. Facebook posts concerning annoyances, disappointments, illnesses, tragedies and frustration and the rest proved too large for the “like” button to handle.
With the addition of the “Reaction” and the obvious absence of a direct “Dislike” button or any other strong resentment tool, Facebook may intend that not to provide direct hate-battle tools at least not any outside of the good old way of written comments which well have even supported emoji on Facebook for some time now.
Facebook has announced that the pop-up feature will initially be tested on two markets only :Ireland and Spain. Following results from these two test countries, Facebook might decide to tweak it a little further or roll it out straight to its 1.4 billion global users.
Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s director of product explained that Spain and Ireland were chosen for their mighty national user bases without extensive international friend networks so they could work as closed test groups. Spain will tell Facebook how well a non-English user audience perceive the feature while Ireland is English speaking.
Although a Nigerian Facebook audience would prefer a seventh emoji which expresses ” there is God o”!