Before today, if you liked a message on Twitter and wanted others to see it, you could retweet it. And if you liked a tweet and wanted to keep it all to yourself, you could "favorite" it by tapping the little star icon, which would fill in and save it as a quasi-bookmark in your account. Today Twitter announced a change to its social platform that will rock the very foundations of the Internet: the star is now a heart. Oh, and it's called a "like" now.

You can say a lot with a heart. Introducing a new way to show how you feel on Twitter: https://t.co/WKBEmORXNW pic.twitter.com/G4ZGe0rDTP

— Twitter (@twitter) November 3, 2015

The move is a small one, but it's almost certainly designed to make Twitter more accessible to newcomers who might be somewhat confused by the star imagery. (I guess. Maybe. Is it that difficult?) Twitter probably didn't want something too similar to Facebook, which uses a thumbs up icon to achieve pretty much the same thing. The heart icon is already used on Twitter's Periscope live streaming app, and it will be coming to Vine and Twitter's official clients on the web, Android, iOS, and TweetDeck.

Third party Twitter clients like Fenix should be updated with the change to a heart icon before too long, though those Android Twitter apps that haven't been updated in some time might still use the old star. Oh, and one last thing: at the moment Lucky Charms cereal is trending on Twitter, presumably as a result of all this talk about hearts and stars. Horseshoes, clovers, blue moons, pots of gold, rainbows, and red balloons have yet to make an appearance.

Source: Twitter blog