Earlier this month, Twitter replaced its star-shaped "favorite" button with a heart-shaped "like" button. Now recent reports said the social network may introduce more emoji reactions following this change.
According to USA Today, Twitter user @_Ninji discovered the feature after he noticed a selective range of emoji by hovering over the heart. The user's iOS Twitter was patched to "force-enable all the features that are only activated for specific users."
"I can't believe they're finally letting me (100) tweets," the Twitter user posted.
Twitter explained that the star button was confusing to newcomers that's why the company had it changed into a heart. "Users might 'like' a lot of things but not everything can be your 'favorite,'" Twitter noted.
Akarshan Kumar, product manager of Twitter, stated that 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", Kumar added.
Twitter may catch up on the growing popularity of emoji and GIFs if it launches its new emoji feature to express a wider range of feelings at a click of a button. An emoji was even chosen by the Oxford Dictionaries as the Word of the Year for 2015, specifically the "face with tears of joy" emoji.
Recently, Facebook also tested its latest feature "Reactions," which is a range of emojis that let people select from "love," "haha," "wow," and "yay." Angry and sad faces were also added during a test in Spain and Ireland to supplement Facebook's "like" button.
Similarly, the new social network Slack introduced a feature that lets users comment on posts using any emoji, The Verge reported.
Just like Facebook and Slack, Twitter is developing these emojis to help users express themselves more.
When the media outlets asked for Twitter's comments about emoji reactions, the social network's official response was a "speak-no-evil" monkey emoji.
