I was on Facebook the other day and updated my status, it was nothing dramatic - just congratulations Ellie on the baby'. I could have just as easily updated this status on Twitter.<p>Around 4 hours later I logged into Facebook and to my amazement 9 people had liked my status. They didn't comment but were clearly happy that Ellie had had the baby and felt compelled 'to like'.<p>This got me to thinking - why is there not a 'like' button on Twitter. I know you can Retweet but some of the friends who liked my status have a different set of friends to me and so if they would have posted the news on their Facebook stream it would have meant nothing to anybody.<p>The amount of times I see good news on Twitter and think 'yeah that is cool' if I see it on Facebook I can like it and that person (however sad this may be) is pleased because they have brightened up someones day.<p>If Twitter introduced 'like' I would use it. Would you?
Twitter and Facebook look at value in orthogonal directions.<p>On Facebook, the importance of every post is dictated by how much interaction it generates. This is very visible: comments and Likes are listed on every post. In a hurry, you can decide a post's value by how many people have already interacted. Liking a post keeps the interaction within the OP's profile page. By scrolling through someone's profile, you get a feel for how popular they are within the service.<p>On the other hand, the value of a Tweet is proportional to the number of people who see it. This is sometimes difficult to guess when inspecting the original tweet, since Twitter does not track old-style Retweets. It doesn't matter though, since your message is broadcast to dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of people you didn't reach by yourself. The threshold of quality is a little higher with a Retweet: in a sense, you must be willing to say the original Tweet yourself. But a popular Tweet can reach more people than a good Facebook post.
The fav feature is the like button. You can see your most popular tweets at <a href="http://favstar.fm/users/<yourtwittername>" rel="nofollow">http://favstar.fm/users/<yourtwittername></a>;<p>From there click on the recent button to see what tweets of yours were recently faved, or the given button to see what you have faved.<p>I've recently started integrating RT tracking too, as tech tweeters do tend to use RT more than likes.<p>If you log into <a href="http://favstar.fm" rel="nofollow">http://favstar.fm</a> once, it will start collecting favs and RTs you give and receive almost instantly. Otherwise it collects them more slowly using twitter's REST api.
The twitter analogue is the "re-tweet" which IMHO is pretty obnoxious; your stream gets clogged with your friends RT'ing things about people you've a) never heard of and b) if you had and you cared, you'd just follow them yourself.<p>Twitter at scale is a one-way "write only" medium.
A lot of people treat the favourite button (star) as "like". Unfortunately neither Twitter's web interface nor its API expose this data in a very useful way, so it only really has an effect if the like-ee is using a sufficiently thick native client or a third-party site like <a href="http://favstar.fm/" rel="nofollow">http://favstar.fm/</a> to keep track of who's faved their tweets.
I have the feeling Facebook's leadership is dramatically pragmatic: if it works, let's use it. They borrow ideas from lots of people, "like" came from friendfeed I believe? And Twitter's leadership seems more, how shall I say it, more interested in doing it "right" or taking the high road in terms of features. They have stayed extremely minimal for such a popular service, in terms of features.<p>They could add "like", which would surely add value, but then again they could also add a dozen other features that add value. But in doing that, they'd dilute their simple value proposition: real time updates.<p>Whether laser-focusing on 1 feature/value is smarter than adding other features and having a more complete offering is smart, only time will tell, I'm really not sure at this point.
Even HN has "like"!<p>Well, it's an up-arrow, but it still servers the same point: to allow you to support a comment without requiring a low-signal comment to do so.<p>OTOH, twitter isn't exactly high-signal in the first place.
Why stop at Twitter?<p>Why can't Hacker News have a like button for 'Ask HN' posts?<p>I don't really want to upvote this post, nor write a text-based reply communicating my feelings. Instead, I want to push a 'Like' button.<p>Conversely, why is there no 'Dislike' or 'Hate' button on Facebook?
I think what you're finding is that facebook is far better for 'personal 2 way communication', whilst twitter is better for mass announcement.<p>It's a different scale of working. FWIW, I much prefer facebook, especially for things like family announcements.
What about the little 'favourite star'? Surely that achieves the exact same thing ultimately?. I think, but I can't remember for sure, that the number of times a tweet has been favourited is returned by the api, so clients could show it if they wanted.<p>FWIW, I do not personally like the 'Like' button in Facebook at all. The most banal things get 'liked' which totally devalues it. A 'Does not like' button would have been more interesting :)
I use Buzz, which does have a like button. Twitter has the people, but it seems so primitive when you look at Buzz instead. Yes, I know its simplicity is part of its charm, but you shouldn't need URL shorteners to share a link and 3rd party clients just to be able to use the website easily (Just try following a conversation on the main site).<p>I highly recommend Buzz as an alternative, if you can convince your friends to switch over too.
A few of us have been interested in providing this feature on Twitter as part of more general effort in social sentiment (it's just a "is this anything?" project at this point). We see the similarity between 'Retweet' and 'Like' - however, we think the presence of a 'Dislike' would somewhat segregate what a 'Retweet' vs. a 'Like' is for.<p>You can see the most recent result of efforts in this 30 second YouTube video. It demonstrates where we are with a browser plugin to add 'Like' and 'Dislike' to every tweet viewed on Twitter.com: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlZVBCSXsK8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlZVBCSXsK8</a><p>Would love to hear your thoughts on it.<p>The more underlying sentiment "gathering and storing" system can be found at: <a href="http://upprdwnr.com" rel="nofollow">http://upprdwnr.com</a>
"Like" seems pretty limited on Twitter.<p>News spreads on Twitter, and most of it you can't really "like" without looking like some kind of sociopath.<p>Tweets are also short enough to immediately show their relevance. In theory, anything that's retweeted should show its value at a glance, whether it's funny, interesting or tragic.
Amazing, I've been thinking about it for the past few days and i feel it would be good to have a "like" button but maintained inside the twitter ecosystem.<p>With that we could build some kind of rating system to show the most liked or influential tweets around...
I don't want the feature.<p>Twitter and Facebook are different things. Facebook is for sharing things that are important to me as a person, whereas Twitter is about consuming and sharing information that is important to me as a professional.
Twitter <i>does</i> have this functionality - it's called a ReTweet. Terminology differs, but it's essentially the same thing - both likes and retweets show up in the user's timelines, and both indicate liking what someone else has said.
The 'Retweet' button is Twitter's version of the Like Button, and it is for this reason they have disabled the ability to edit the tweet so as to mimic the 'single-click' behavior of Like buttons.
While the retweet button is similar to like (my co-founder and I actually discussed this the day before), I do think that a Twitter Like button may come along eventually. In fact, I think it's even possible for an upstart Twitter client to decide (on its own or with some of the other clients) to implement a Like button protocol, in the hopes that Twitter would eventually adopt it.<p>Like buttons are great for monetization, so I think it could make sense for Twitter.
I don't understand your line of thinking. I agree that facebook status and twitter are essentially the same thing (and the same level of useless), but if you like one particular feature of one site why not just use that site and not the other site. If twitter keeps on replicating the same things fb does then why do we have two different websites.