After implementing hearts on its Periscope livestreaming service, Twitter is bringing them over to two of its other services.
Twitter is adding hearts to Twitter and Vine, replacing the star for favorites on Twitter and the smiley face on Vine. Additionally, Twitter favorites will no longer be known as favorite. Instead, they’ll be known as “likes.”
So why the change? Twitter says that it wants to make Twitter “easier and more rewarding to use” and that the star might’ve been confusing to some people. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite,” the company says, adding that the heart is a “universal symbol.”
The switch from stars to hears and faves to likes is kind of a strange one considering how long stars have been around. But Twitter probably wanted the same symbol for liking something across all of its services, and it chose hearts from Periscope. And the meaning of “like” is already well-known thanks to Facebook, and now the same thing is on Twitter, just with a heart instead of a star.
Hearts and likes are rolling out to Twitter on Android, iOS, the web, TweetDeck, and Twitter for Windows 10 starting today.