Expanding Like

When a news story consists of the launch of a button that brings up a menu of seven rather childish-looking emoji, it’s easy to dismiss it as a frivolity. But when this frivolity affects the way in which 1.5 billion people around the world communicate with each other, and when it is almost certainly going to be used universally as a speedy and simple way of saying certain things, or when you think of the number of times in the future you will answer somebody in a conversation by using one of these emojis, one can begin to understand the magnitude of a Facebook change, of the care that has gone into it, and of the myriad implications.

Facebook is expanding its Like button, calling it Reactions: keep the Like button pressed and up comes a menu with the images seen here, and that have obviously been thought out and then rethought ad nauseam to express certain emotions, but without becoming, as Mark has said, “a constant referendum” or overly polarizing. Basically, the idea is to allow people greater subtlety of expression than Like, but without going as far as saying I don’t like.

The initiative is being tried out in Spain and Ireland, which were chosen on the basis of the number of people that use the service and how often they do, as well as one being English-speaking and the other not, and also because of the relative lack of international connections within their networks. The Spanish and the Irish, it would seem, have less friends in other countries, and we’re relatively homogeneous, geographically speaking. It’s noteworthy that a company like Facebook, which has mountains of data, should choose Ireland and Spain to test run this, but analytics are analytics, and I have no problems with it. After this trial, the service will be rolled out around the world.

It’s interesting to think about how Facebook went about this: it realized that large numbers of its users wanted to be able to say more than simply Like, and so started to put together a collection of one word responses, and which were the most effective. The company also included stickers back in October that people could use in their comments, and then analyzed which were used most frequently and how they could be grouped. The result of this was the seven buttons you can see above. It’s not hard to imagine oneself using one of these, and that pretty much seem to cover the gamut of emotions.

The significance of these types of immediate reactions, literally available at the click of a button, is greater than might at first appear. Obviously, anything can be said with a comment, but the expressive power and the entry barrier is very different, meaning greater interaction. Another question is what conclusions Facebook will draw from our pages: I’m sure it would be very interesting to study how people use the seven options, but also much more complex than simply counting Likes.

The range of analytical possibilities is huge: whereas before you had to content yourself with “my content today has generated this number of Likes and that number of Unlikes, and where Unlike doesn’t mean “I don’t like it”, but instead “I no longer like it”, or “I don’t want to receive any more page updates,” could offer an infinite number of possibilities along the lines of “I have lost this many Likes and what’s more, in my latest entry have that amount of Angry, and should be careful when talking about that subject” for example.

In terms of relevance, behind this apparent frivolity is possibly one of the most fascinating exercises in interface design around at the moment. Now let’s see how it develops.

(En espa?ol, aquí)