Twitter discontinues favorites, now you can like a tweet

Most people wondered what Twitter’s “favorite” button does. It is basically away for users to signal some form of agreement, acknowledgement, laughter, support, and occasionally utter hatred. Today we can officially say it is dead. The company said today that it is replacing favorites with “likes,” to be represented in its apps and on the web by red heart icons. Twitter product manager Akarshan Kumar said in a blog post said, “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.”

Favorites were initially designed as a way of bookmarking tweets — a feature that feels fairly insane for a service whose messages are limited to 140 characters and (at the time) could not include photos or videos. But from the start, third-party developers sought to make the feature more useful. A service called Favrd sprung up to highlight popular tweets in real time based on the number of favorites, and it quickly became popular among the newly minted profession of Twitter humorists. (Favrd closed in 2009 after the emergence of Favstar, a more robust competitor that endures to this day.)