Many features on Facebook – Facebook Chat, friend suggestions, Timeline profile pages – have been created at the company’s hackathons. At one such event, a Facebook engineer created a ‘sympathize’ button as an alternative to ‘like’ making it more appropriate for gloomier status updates.
Currently the ‘like’ button serves as the only way to recognize friend updates without having to write or share yourself. There are however no guarantees that this feature will make its way to the social network. Speaking at Facebook’s Compassion Research Day, Dan Muriello – engineer at the social media company said, “It would be, ‘five people sympathize with this,’ instead of ‘five people ‘like’ this’. Which of course a lot of people were – and still are – very excited about. But we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product. Yet.”
