Does Facebook need an ‘Ah’ button?

How many times have you been browsing through Facebook and seen a sad update from an old acquaintance or friend that you’ve lost touch with? You really want to show that you care but don’t know them well enough to comment direct with out it sounding weird, even worse – then you see someone has hit the ‘Like’ button. Eeeek!

One of the Facebook engineers came up with the idea of a ‘sympathize’ button to fix this issue during the Facebooks annual compassion research day. The social media giant dedicates 1 whole day per year to share various ways to ‘build empathy and foster trust’ with users.

This idea was that the button be hidden from view unless the user added a negative emotion from Facebooks predetermined list, this would then hide the ‘Like’ button and replace it with the new ‘Sympathy’ button.

Facebook have no plans to launch this button in the near future but it did create a lot of excitement during the conference – exactly the same situation happened with the ‘Like’ button which was also an idea formed at a conference.