Facebook's 'like' button gets 'angry' and 'sad' as friends
On Wednesday, Facebook started making haha, ''angry and three other responses available in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
In changing a core part of Facebook — the 7-year-old "like" button has become synonymous with the social network — the company said it tried to keep things familiar.
The thumbs-up "like" button will look just as it long has, without the other choices cluttering the screen or confusing people.
When a friend posts that his father has died, or a cousin gets frustrated with her morning commute, hitting "like" might seem insensitive.
Facebook chose to offer more nuanced reactions — love, ''haha, ''wow, ''sad and angry — alongside like — to give users greater control over their expressivity, says Julie Zhuo, Facebook's product design director.
Even a generic happy face "was a little bit ambiguous and harder for people to understand," Zhuo says.
[...] Facebook wants to show what it thinks you're most interested in — and that might ultimately mean mostly happy posts, rather than ones that evoke sadness or anger.
Zhuo says Facebook will tweak its formulas based on how people respond.
Why so long?
Besides deciding on how many and which specific reactions to offer, Facebook needed to figure out the right way for people to discover and use it.