If Twitter broke your heart by replacing its ubiquitous "favorite" button with a heart-shaped "like" button, more emotive buttons may be coming to your rescue.
A Twitter user _Ninji noticed he could select a range of emoji including a frown and party noisemaker by hovering over the heart. The user said he had iOS Twitter patched to "force-enable all the features that are only activated for specific users." The Verge spotted the tweets.
Twitter announced earlier this month that it was switching out the "star" for a "heart," to convey a "like" rather than a "favorite." The company said the star button was confusing to newcomers and noted that Twitter users 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," Akarshan Kumar, a product manager at Twitter said in a statement. "The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people."
If Twitter now introduces emoji to express a much broader range of emotions at the click of a button, it will be catching up on the growing popularity of emoji and GIFs to quickly communicate a reaction or an emotion on social networks and messaging services around the world. The Oxford Dictionaries even chose the "face with tears of joy" emoji as its Word of the Year for 2015, referencing an explosion in "emoji culture."
Facebook recently began testing "Reactions," giving users a range of emojis to pick from such as "love," "haha," "wow" and "yay." Also available during the test in Spain and Ireland are angry and sad faces to supplement Facebook's "like" button.
But will a breadth of emoji complicate the experience for users just as Twitter was seeking to simplify it?
Twitter's official comment to The Verge and to USA TODAY was a "speak-no-evil" monkey emoji.
