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October 24, 2012

Twitter to Replace its Long-Standing 'Favorite' Option

By Shankar Pandiath, TMCnet Contributor

Twitter (News - Alert) may be in the process of innovating its ‘favorite’ option. Two replacements called ‘star’ and ‘like’ are reportedly being tested for the replacement.



The new features, however, will apparently be available only to a select group of users, and it is not clear whether the proposed change is temporary or permanent.

Some users of twitter are seeing the term ‘star’ or ‘like’ in their timelines in Twitter in place of the traditional “favorite.” The new replacement for now appears to be showing up only for certain users on the service.

Twitter is in testing mode, and by evaluating different variations of the button, site administrators will get an idea of the option that is most popular with its users.

The favorite feature is been on Twitter for several years now. The Next Web, one of the world’s largest online publications delivering latest news and international perspective about Internet technology, business and culture, first reported that the “favorite” feature was indeed a popular and useful one and has been used many times.

In the website’s current form, users can save a tweet by clicking on the “favorite” option. The tweet is then saved in the user’s account and the listing is available to them whenever they want to check or refer back to it.

There is a catch: if Twitter does decide to switch “favorite” to “like,” it might catch the eye of Facebook (News - Alert) and that can’t be a favorable situation for Twitter. Facebook has relied on its “like” feature for years now to increase engagement among its users across the service.

From the point of Facebook, to allow the competitor to use the same word can be a big problem. And the “star” feature is what fledgling social platform App.net has been using itself. Gmail also has had the star feature for long as well, as a way of sorting one’s mail in Gmail.




Edited by Braden Becker
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