Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Author's posts
Feb 24
Get Ready For A Whole New Facebook Experience As Reactions Launches Today
Alerted to this by a post from the ever-watchful Christopher Penn on Facebook, I confirmed that Reactions also works in Facebook mobile apps. On the iOS app if you just quickly tap the "Like" button you will "like" that post as you always have done. But if you hold down your tap just a moment longer, you will get a pop-up menu:
After you have chosen one of these reactions, it will then appear at the bottom of the post in both an emoji form and in a text word visible to you:
As with a standard "Like" you can just tap the word to remove the reaction. If you do the longer tap you can change your reaction.
Now, on my iPhone, I had to kill off the Facebook app and re-launch it in order for the reactions to appear but once I did that it worked fine.
The six "reactions" are:
- Like
- Love
- Haha
- Wow
- Sad
- Angry
I expect we'll initially see a lot of playing around with these reactions as people experiment with the reactions, but longer term I do see a value in this increased range of reactions. For instance, there are certainly news posts being passed around right now that I want to indicate that I'm glad someone shared... but I certainly don't "like" the content of the news post.
Similarly when a tragic event happens in someone's life and I may not have the words to say in a comment, it hasn't felt right to "like" their post - this now gives an option of "Sad". Having said that... I can think of some posts that I "dislike" but that are not "sad" and don't rise to the level of me being "angry". My option there may be to continue to simply do nothing.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see what this does to our NewsFeeds over the next few days and over the weeks ahead.
What do you think? Do you like having the new "reactions"? Will you use them? Or do you think they are unnecessary? Will you just stick with the plain old "Like"?
And what "reaction" will you give this blog post when you see it on Facebook? ;-)
UPDATE #1 - After a few hours of using Reactions, a couple of additional points.
1. Only for posts, not comments - the Reactions buttons appear only for the "Like" link for a post / status update / photo / etc. If you want to react to a comment you are still limited to "Like".
2. Notifications mention reactions - when you see pop-up notifications or look in your list of notifications, the new Reactions are displayed separately from the traditional Likes.
One thing to keep in mind, too, is that beyond helping you express yourself more, the Reactions also help Facebook in more accurately tracking what you think about NewsFeed items and therefore allowing them to more carefully target advertising to you.
UPDATE #2 - A very large number of articles about Reactions up on Techmeme.
This article in Wired provides a good view into the design of the Reactions and the testing that wound up with the 6 reactions launched today.
Feb 22
TDYR 291 – Mobile World Congress (MWC), Facebook Keynote and more
Feb 22
Watch Live TODAY From MWC 2016: Michael Kende on panel before/after Mark Zuckerberg keynote
Today in about an hour, at 17:45 CET (UTC+1), our Chief Economist Michael Kende will join a Mobile World Live panel to provide commentary before and after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote at 18:00 CET. You can watch Michael's panel and the Zuckerberg keynote at:
Feb 20
An Interoperable IoT? Deadline of Feb 22 for Proposals for IoT Semantic Interoperability Workshop (Featured Blog)
Feb 20
How Can We Make The IoT More Interoperable? Deadline of Monday 22 Feb for proposals for IoT Semantic Interoperability Workshop
How can we make the Internet of Things (IoT) more interoperable? How can we help ensure that when you buy a light bulb from one IoT vendor it will work with the light bulb from another IoT vendor? How can we avoid getting to a place where we have to use many different apps to control all the different devices in our homes?
Feb 17
TDYR 290 – Being Present and Embracing The Longest Walk To School
Feb 16
Over $1 Billion in Payments Made on Venmo in January 2016 (Featured Blog)
Feb 16
TDYR 289 – The First Step To Successful Writing / Blogging Is …
Feb 16
The First Step To Successful Writing/Blogging Is To Put Words On The Screen
The first step to successful writing or blogging is very simple...
write something!
Put words on the page or on the screen.
End the tyranny of the "blank page" or "blank screen".
Start... somewhere.
Write... something.
And then, in the case of blogging, hit the almighty "Publish" button and send your words out into the ether for others to find and consume.
I've been struggling with this a good bit myself lately. If you look at my danyork.me site and see the calendar on the right side for this month (Feb 2016), the dates in blue are when I have published blog posts or articles across any of the 12+ sites where I write. This includes the Internet Society main blog and Deploy360 site, where writing on those sites is part of my job.
It's pretty sparse for someone who claims to be a "writer".
There are a zillion excuses and explanations I can give, of course. I've been "too busy". I've been caught up in "planning" for future events and activities. I've been sucked into "research". I've been writing words for articles and posts that are published under other people's names. I've been very tired with some other activities going on. I just haven't had the time.
All of which are true. But all of which are irrelevant.
The truth is that we prioritize what is important to us... and there's always time in there for dashing off even a small post such as this one.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a recent post from Greg Ferro titled "Blogging Success Is Simply About Doing" where he writes this:
You can be guaranteed that nothing will happen if you publish nothing. I can guarantee that something will happen if you publish something.
Exactly.
The first step is to ... write something.
Today, this post is that "something" for me.
What will yours be?