Twitter replaces stars with hearts for favoriting Vines and tweets

The way you’ve “faved” (read: favorited) something on Twitter and its six-second video service Vine is going to change starting today. The company has announced that it’s changing its star icon to a heart. The rationale: a star could be confusing for users, especially those who are just starting out on the service.

The new “fave” will be available today on Twitter’s iOS, Android, and Windows 10 apps, Twitter.com, TweetDeck, and also on Vine’s Android app and website. Updates for Vine for iOS and Twitter for Mac will be coming “soon.”

Converting to hearts isn’t exactly a surprise, as the company had been experimenting with them with some users for the past few months. But why a heart? Twitter product manager Akarshan Kumar explained 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.”

In making this shift, Twitter and Vine are following what Periscope has already had in place since the beginning. Of course, some die-hard users will surely be displeased with the idea of abandoning the star in favor of the heart. And if Twitter thinks that simply changing a symbol is going to be enough to turn around its misfortunes, then we’re in for a really long and bumpy ride.

However, the heart renders moot any lingering questions around what the star really means (Is it a bookmark?).

Chalk this up to another victory for venture capitalist and early Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who wrote a lengthy post in which he remarked that Twitter should introduce “hearts” and predicted that, once in place, “engagement across the entire service would explode.”

We shall see.

Heart this tweet, please?