This new feature is now rolling out to users across the world, but we know this because major publications like Engadget and TechCrunch have broke the news, as we’re still waiting for an official announcement from Facebook. However, according to insiders, it seems Facebook will start testing the feature on users in Ireland and Spain starting from tomorrow, and we should expect the new feature to roll-out in the near future for the rest of us. The name of the new feature is called “Reactions,” and it will bring a new set of six emoji that will sit alongside the original thumbs-up to let users quickly respond with love, laughter, happiness, sadness, shock and anger. As you can see in the above screenshot, the new emoticons are called Love, Haha, Yay, Wow, Sad and Angry.
The upcoming change is already long overdue, if you ask me, since there’s so much content being shared online, and you don’t necessarily want to approve of what’s being posted. Let’s say that somebody shares some sad or shocking news, and you press the like button. It’s kind of awkward, isn’t it? To like, let’s say for the sake of the argument, the fact that a rare species has now gone extinct or that there’s a new war. Still, we have more emoticons for positive feelings, so let’s hope that we won’t be using too much of the sad and angry emoticons. The ability to “react” with gifs and or emoji has become increasingly common among netizens, so it was only a matter a time before Facebook rolled out its own tool. And I have a feeling that this is just the beginning, and that we are going to see many other emoticons being included. There’s already the plethora of actions that you can display on your status, so Facebook could easily bring that to the new Reactions feature. The new reactions will apply to user posts and those from “pages”, and there’s going to be breakdown of which responses each message received. They will appear across both mobile and desktop versions of the app and on all posts in the News Feed. At the moment it seems that Facebook Messenger and other Facebook-owned services won’t be getting the new feature. I can’t wait to truly be able to express what exactly is my reaction to whatever is being shared on the world’s biggest social network, what about you?
