Facebook's new Like button reactions are rolling out to a device near you

If you are or have ever been on Facebook (let's face it, who hasn't) then you surely know of the pivotal Like button - the perfect millisecond gesture for expressing anything from acknowledgement to plain out mockery, while remaining perfectly vague to confuse mostly everybody involved.

Well, you are definitely not the only one in the know about this ambiguity and the social giant has finally decided to address it with a slew of various reaction icons to complement the good old thumbs up (but rest assured, it is still there ... thank god). Actually, Facebook has been testing the new emoticons for quite some time in select places, Spain and Ireland to be exact, and now feels it has the perfect set of options to roll out globally.

The reactions include "love," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry" and come in the shape of new icons hidden away under the like button, so to say. What this means is that the Like button is still center stage, but if you long press it on mobile or hover on a PC, the other options will be revealed. So now you can be sympathetic to those all to common grim Facebook status updates without beeing too creepy (the new likes sadly don't do anything to fix the innate awkwardness of such posts in the first place, but hey, we can't be too nitpicky).

All in all, if you really don't care about the Like button all that much, you probably won't notice any difference in your feed, besides that the likes counter should now report on the number of "reacted" and there might be an informative pop-up or two to be had next time you open Facebook.

Source | Via