That helped engineers pick the five reactions that would go into the feature, it said – which notably doesn’t include the much-requested Dislike button, which the Reactions are meant to replace.
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The new reactions buttons were unveiled last October as a test project for Facebook users in Spain and Ireland.
The technology giant today has rolled out an extension to its “like” button -Reactions -through which users can now express what they think about a status in a form of six emoticons: like, sad, wow, love, anger, and laugh.
Facebook said it would decide later how new reactions should be weighted to personalize news feeds. “For more than a year we have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most”. “We’ve been listening and we thought there should be more ways to express how you feel about something in the newsfeed”.
“People wanted to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotions”, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
The thumbs-up “like” button will look just as it long has, without the other choices cluttering the screen or confusing people.
Facebook has been testing the feature for a year in select markets before rolling it out finally. By clicking on the total number of engagements with the post (the number to the right of the reaction icons) you can see broken down how many people used each reaction.
By tapping into the reaction count (on mobile), or hovering over the emoji (on desktop), you can get a full view of exactly who is behind each reaction.
“Like” still takes center stage: Zhuo says people click on “like” more than a billion times a day, so “we didn’t want to make that any harder”. Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating.
The changes to perhaps the website’s most fundamental feature are sure to be a cause for great discussion. According to the news, the ” Yay” emotion which is also expected to be released was not seen in the Wednesday’s launch video.Facebook users also expecting a “Dislike” image in the list of emotions.
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Zuckerberg said at the time that Facebook had been working on expanded options for some time.
