FACEBOOK ‘REACTIONS’

Any person who is a user of Facebook can now select from the ‘Reactions’ like sad, love, happiness, angry on top of the like button, commenting or sharing button. If we are on our phone, the new buttons are viewed after we hold the like button down. If we are using a computer, we will view these when we hover our mouse over this like button.

The Facebook researcher and development team, engineers & the product teams have engaged more than a year for preparing the reactions for the launch. They have worked with the sociologists, have consulted the focus groups & conducted the surveys in order to determine which emotions will make the final cut. They have viewed at one of the most popular stickers

& emoticons on the platform for the clues. According to the product manager Sammi Krug, narrowing the set of possible responses & ensuring that the emoji faces will be universally understood & equally useful were two of some biggest challenges they faced. She said that they needed to be very careful about the reactions that they launch.

She also questioned people through CNN Money in an interview held last week“Are we giving people more tools to express themselves more accurately and authentically?”. Earlier to the Wednesday’s global release, the reactions were already live for the Facebook users in countries like Spain, Ireland, Chile, Philippines along with a few other countries.

The initial reactions to Reactions has been positive so far as Krug said & ‘Love’ has been the most popular out of these. ‘Yay’ which is an eyes closed smiley face was scrapped after the tests found that not everyone was able to learn its meaning. It is one of the biggest surprises, said Krug.

A reaction missing from this set of responses is a dislike button, an option which the CEO Zuckerberg first hinted about in September. But launching of a dislike button could have risked Facebook by turning Facebook into a place where people vote the posts up or down.

Zuckerberg said during a town hall Q&A that it doesn’t seem to be the kind of community which they want to build. Reactions has been marked as one of the biggest changes which have been made to the Facebook platform since its launch twelve years ago right up there with the news feed & timeline.

Like all those functions, it is another attempt of keeping the Facebook fresh & to deepen people’s attachment to a site and application. Some of the users can find the new choices confusing and not helpful. But even if few million people “Love” or laugh a few times a day, there is still a number of new, profit-driving data for Facebook and its advertisers.