#Facebook: At Long Last, "Reactions" Rolled Out To Users Worldwide

Like or dislike? You decide. No, you really decide. With a bunch of new Facebook reactions.

After a years of trial discussions and trials runs, and working on building alternatives to its trademark “like”, the social media giant has finally rolled out “Reactions” to the rest of the world.

Facebook Reactions Emoji — Source: Facebook

First announced by Mark Zuckerberg himself, the feature is basically a more expressive “Like” button. It gives Facebook users more ways to express love, awe, humour, and sadness, just to name a few.

How can we access Facebook’s “Reactions”? By simply long pressing or hovering over the “Like” button. There are 5 animated emoji and each emotive icon is named for the reaction it’s meant to convey – “Love”, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad”, and “Angry”. Users will be notified when their posts receive a ”Reaction” in the same way they’re notified about “Likes”.

Facebook really gave their “Reactions” a lot of thought. The team behind the product design reportedly enlisted Dacher Keltner, a professor of social psychology at UC Berkeley to help distill the vast range of human emotions into a single row of emoji. Dacher had worked with Facebook previously to develop stickers and he was also a science consultant on Pixar’s “Inside Out“.

Here are the different stylistic variations of each Facebook Reactions emoji that they tried before settled on the final 6. (Source: Facebook)

Prior to today’s announcement, “Reactions” were available in only 7 countries: Ireland, Spain, Chile, the Philippines, Portugal, Colombia, and Japan. According to Facebook product manager Sammi Krug, results from those countries have been highly positive, with “Love” being the most popular reaction so far.

If you haven’t gotten it yet, fret not. Facebook said that it will take a few days for the feature to roll out to all users globally across its iOS and Android apps, desktop, and the mobile web. Users must have the latest version of the app to see the feature.

On whether they’re going to expand “Reactions” to other Facebook-owned apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, Facebook said that they don’t have any plans to do so right now, but the feature could carry over to other apps in the future.