What do you mean when you favorite something on Twitter? That you like it? Simply that you saw it? That you want to save the link for later?
Right now, that little star has a plethora of meanings. But I think I know how to fix that:
Slack’s emoji favoriting feature, which lets you respond to a message with whatever emoji you fancy selecting, is the perfect solution to this particular Twitter intention gap.
The great advantage of bringing emoji favoriting to the social network would be freeing up the ‘star’ (or ‘heart’ that Twitter has experimented with changing it to) for a single purpose – saving tweets for later.
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When Slack introduced the feature, I scoffed, thinking it was an utter novelty. But, in fact, it’s turned out to be a really useful way to show you liked/didn’t like/were amused by something.
Twitter users are famously inventive. Retweets, @-replies and hashtags are all now standard features that came from experimentation by individuals. Imagine what they’d come up with if emoji favoriting was implemented.
And if you’re worried about the feature instantly being used for trolling, that’s easily solved: Restrict the emoji set to positive or neutral options. Though, it must be said I’d be sad not to see the little smiling poop among them. ?
Read next: Sony is making an emoji movie. This should be the plot…
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