Twitter copies Facebook and Instagram with new "like" heart
On Tuesday, Twitter changed its "favourite" star shaped button to a "like" button in the shape of a heart. The new feature combines and copies Facebook's like option and Instagram's heart symbol and will allow brand marketers to analyse tweets' data to decide whether the new “like” option achieves higher engagement. So far reactions to the change on Twitter have been mixed.  

Twitter wants users to show their appreciation for tweets more often, so today it replaced the "favorite" button with a "like" button in the shape of a heart. The San Francisco company said it thought the old button—which appeared as a star icon—was too confusing.

Regular social media users will recognize the like as a Facebook move and the heart symbol as the way to show appreciation on Instagram. So when Twitter's product manager Akarshan Kumar wrote that "we'll be calling them likes" in his blog post without acknowledging the term exists elsewhere on the Web, we can probably assume it was done with at least a little tongue-in-cheek humor in mind.