Facebook is developing a 'sympathise' button as an alternative to the 'like' button. If a user tags their status with a negative emotion, then his or her friends will be able to 'sympathise' with the post rather than press the 'like' button.
Until now the ‘like’ button has proved to be unsuitable for use on gloomy occasions such as the death of a pet.
Bad news such as the changing of a relationship status from ‘married’ to ‘divorced’ has also stretched the limits of the feature.
The ‘sympathise’ button emerged at a Facebook ‘hackathon’ event, where the company's engineers come together and brainstorm new ideas.
Many of the site’s most popular features such as the Timeline and even the ‘like’ button have emerged from past such events. According to Dan Muriello, a software engineer at Facebook, the feature will not work for every post. However, he said if a user tags a status with certain emotions the result would be "five people sympathise with this," instead of "five people ‘like’ this". He said: "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." Mr Muriello did not give a timeline for when the ‘sympathise’ button might be rolled out. Facebook has long ruled out the idea of a ‘dislike’ button despite online campaigns by thousands of users on the grounds that it is too negative. A Facebook spokesman said that hackathons are ‘the foundation for great innovation and thinking about how we can better serve people around the world’. He added: "Some of our best ideas come from hackathons, and the many ideas that don’t get pursued often help us think differently about how we can improve our service". Facebook is the largest social network in the world with 1.19 billion users worldwide, of which 24 million are in the UK, or almost half the population
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