Currently being tested on some Facebook users is a litany of emotion tags you can select to explain your various states. You know, because Facebook users were so bad at communicating absolutely everything before.
The idea is that you type the text, and then select a little tag that appears next to your text. So basically, you’d type “I’m sad” and then immediately after it would be a little frowny face with the text “feeling sad” next to it.
Why in God’s name is Facebook creating such an annoying, attention-whoring feature? To appeal to teenagers, of course!
Visual status updates could help Facebook fend off emoji messaging apps like Line, media consumption sharing apps like GetGlue, and the smiley-laden Path. It follows Facebook testing a bunch of new standard status update prompts like “What’s going on, Josh?” and the somewhat creepy “How are you feeling, Josh?”
In other words, Facebook wants us to share even more than we already do, but, sarcasm aside, it’s hard to see what it’ll do other than serve as visual clutter. Facebook already has a bit of a design problem, in the sense that it’s trying to cram more and more into status updates, and we’re not really sure what purpose this will serve.
Then again, considering that all of our parents’ friends seem to find replying to Facebook’s “How are you feeling?” with “Not bad, Facebook, you?” and finding this hilarious, repeatedly, perhaps we’re not the target market here.