Facebook Reactions – Now You Can Hate, Wow and Sulk All You Want

Ladies and gentlemen, Facebook finally understands that human beings have more emotions than merely liking and disliking something. So, in the honor of making Facebook ‘more human,’ the company has decided to launch a series of new emoting emojis namely – love, haha, wow, sad and angry. These new emotes have been dubbed as Facebook Reactions.

‘Not every moment you want to share is happy,’ – Mark Zuckerberg

In a Facebook post, Mark writes, ‘Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts. People want to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotions.” With this, hope to see the ubiquitous thumbs-up button replaced with some other general emotions that we may feel. Atleast now, we won’t have to, ‘like’ a post on someone’s death or illness and can replace that with a tearful emote. That’s how data sharing has evolved over the years; sharing our deepest feelings through the simplest of emoticons.

Facebook Reactions to be Rolled Out from Wednesday

Facebook will be rolling out the emojis globally on Wednesday (which means most of us can use them now or tomorrow based on the timezone).  The emojis are the result of more than a year’s worth of research, survey, focus groups and general consensus – also not to forget the cutesy stickers that we all love. From the data collected, there were five emojis that were acknowledged by cultures around the globe.

We have been very intentional about really understanding what people are trying to communicate on Facebook right now and how can we make that easier. – Tom Alison, engineering director of News Feed

To use them, keep testing your like button (by clicking and holding it) for the next few days and you may be pleasantly surprised once the feature goes live in your region.

A Better Option than the Dislike Button

Remember the ‘dislike’ button fiasco from the past year? Facebook has been pestered by its users to give them more choices than the like button and somehow that transitioned into an assumed availability of a ‘dislike’ button, but thankfully, we now have more. The question is, are these five emoticons enough? Will Facebook consider expanding on the realms of human emotions? Needless to say, that if they consider adding more range of emotions, it’s going to take a few more years because Facebook never does thing easy. In fact, according to Alison, ‘We would consider it if it feels like that’s going to be something that fulfills a need. The more reactions we add, the more complicated it gets.’

So folks, hope you enjoy the new range of ‘simplified emotions’ and can now show the world what you actually feel. Happy Facebooking!

Image Credits: Sessions.EDU / Official Facebook Press Shots