Seems Twitter is trying desperately to stay relevant. I've noticed significant drops in activity in the last 6 months.

I enjoy Twitter but not a fan at all of the heart icon for "Like" and the corresponding animation. But, focus group says the kiddies love it!

Like is better, favourite implies saving the tweet.

Not a big 'heart' fan...

Gives me that impending doom feeling of racing across town to get that forgotten card & candy!

Beyond "I <3 NY", I don't like the use of the heart symbol much at all. To me, it's too touchy feely for anything technical, and too cookie-cutter for most things personal.

favourite implies saving the tweet

I agree, but that's already gotten cheapened by spammers who have been using Favorites on Twitter as a way of sucking in followers. I think the change of "Favorite" to "Like" will cheapen it further, probably what Twitter wants. It will get used a lot. I'll probably get more comfortable with it as time goes on. I've mostly used it as a bookmark... so it was about saving things I liked at least enough so I could find them.

IMO, Twitter's usefulness would be improved a lot if there were a bookmarking system for it.

I'm wondering also whether the change away from "Favorite" was intended to simplify usage for UK users. How was it spelled in the UK? ;)

Looks though like the term "Like" has become a ubiquitous term for approval (even WebmasterWorld is using it), and Facebook's 'thumbs up' symbol in combination with the word "Like" is I believe copyrighted... which left Twitter maybe with a smiling chirping bird symbol if they could come up with one... or whatever commonly recognized symbol that would be recognized with the word "Like", and where the combination wasn't copyrighted.

I can't argue, btw, with the logic in this Twitter blog post at the URL above. I'm sure this is what their tests showed, particularly for non-English speakers....

You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.

The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it...

I believe they should have kept both. The Savvy twitter users already bookmark tweets by adding the people tweeting them into various lists and groups, which while doing the job is a clunky way of dealing with the huge noise of spammers plaguing the network. Now if you have a favourites that act as bookmarks and likes that act as, well...likes, this could be an entirely different thing. Oh and in order not to use favorites for follow funneling, they would be invisible, yet play rank the visibility of the tweet on other peoples walls. Bah... I got too technical about a doomed social network anyway.

Want my honest rebranding tip? - Make twitter subscription based - $4.99 a month for the right to post tweets. This will weed the 28673 million spam users plaguing it, leaving the people who have something to say, to say it out loud.

I like "likes", for me it's more relevant than stars.