Reactions, Live Video Rolling Out to Facebook
- Friday, January 29th, 2016
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Facebook is preparing to roll out Reactions, its long-awaited expansion of the like button, across the globe and all platforms.
The feature, which is currently being tested in a handful of countries including Ireland and Spain, gives users five new options to use when responding to Facebook posts: a heart for love, and emoji for haha, wow, sad and angry. In original testing, there was also a yay option but this has since been removed, in an attempt to streamline the feature.
The company is working to “make sure that we have the UI and interaction simple enough that people could express more of what they wanted without getting in their way,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Reactions is in the process of being tweaked based on those trials, but will roll out across the world “pretty soon”.
“The philosophy behind it is that when you only have a like button, if you share a sad piece of content or something that makes you angry, people may not have the tool to react to it,” said Zuckerberg on an earnings call, off the back of the companys Q4 results. “And therefore over time the community feels less comfortable sharing that kind of content on Facebook. And we want people to be able to share all of the things that are meaningful to them not just the things that are happy and that people are going to like when they see it. And we think that that’s just really important to the mission of the company and we’ll increasing engagement and sharing and openness, and all of the things that we care about.”
Facebook also announced that it was expanding the trial of its live video feature across the US. Initially available in the iOS app only, live video gives users a Periscope-style way of streaming video to their friends and followers. An Android rollout is due to follow soon.