Twitter, the social networking site has rolled out with a big change to its microblogging service. Twitter dumps off its “favorites” button and replaces it with a “heart” so as to offers a better way for users to express their views. The company announced that it is replacing favorites with “likes,” and they will be represented in its apps and on the web by red heart icons.

The changes that are made on the Twitter will also apply to Twitter-owned Vine. Twitter seems to follow Facebook featuring “like” buttons, which have been popular with millions of users.

Instagram, the photo-sharing app bought by the social networking giant, Facebook in the year 2012 also uses heart-shaped icons for users to like the pictures. Twitter walks on the same path aiming to allure new users by simplifying the user experience. The change has already taken place on Twitter.com, the mobile Twitter app, TweetDeck, and Vine’s Android app.

Favorites – ‘Likes’ and Stars – ‘Hearts’

Favorites were actually introduced in 2006 by Twitter and now they got retired and replaced the Star-shaped button with a heart-shaped symbol. Starting today, the change will be rolled out officially and the users will have to click on a heart to like any tweet instead of clicking on a star to favorite.

“We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers,” product manager Akarshan Kumar said in a blog post. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite,” Kumar said the “heart is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures and time zones.”

“The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it,” he added.

The idea of replacing the star with a heart has been around months. The key investor of Twitter Chris Sacca suggested such a change in a June blog post, saying favourite was “too strong a word.” Also, the heart symbol had already been used on Twitter’s Periscope live stream app and now it will  appear on Twitter as well as on Vine, the app for short videos.

Kumar wrote in his blog post as, “Favorite is a superlative. It implies a ranking. In the early days of Twitter, many of us interpreted the word literally and only keep a few tweets in our favourites that were true, well, our favourites,” 

But, it seems that no one likes this new change on Twitter, as the newest mode is a bit less versatile, a bit less powerful, a bit more compressed. A majority of people preferred “favourites” and only a few of them favored the “Likes” option. According to some critics, the change puts people in an awkward situation of liking tweets that are related to some tragic news events. However, as the time passes people will get habituated to this new change.