Monday, 16 December 2013

“Sympathize” button to come to Facebook?

Facebook is testing a “sympathize” button to serve as a replacement option for the “like” button, when necessary.

Last Thursday, a Facebook engineer spoke to the Huffington post and stated that the company is trying out a ‘sympathize’ button.
The idea behind the button lies on a correlation with a ‘sad’ Facebook post. If that sort of post is detected, namely one with the use of a sad
emoticon, Facebook will automatically convert the ‘like’ button.  
The idea sprung from one of Facebook’s regular hackathons, which is an event it hosts in order to take in new thoughts and concepts from those who generally cannot communicate their ideas to the company through other means.
However, there is no guarantee that a seemingly successful idea at a hackathon will turn into reality.
For example, users have been asking Facebook to bring forth a ‘dislike’ button for quite some time now. Seeing as how the use of the ‘like’ button is sometimes inappropriate for those sadder comments, such as the loss of a loved one or proclaiming a rough day, it only seems natural to ask for the different button options.
A reason why the ‘dislike’ button has not come into effect stems from the fear that it would be used for ‘cyber bullying.’
 So, the ‘sympathize’ button would help to evade that predicament.
Even though it is still unknown if the ‘sympathize’ button will eventually go into effect, the recurring comments about having such buttons makes it a possibility.

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