Does Facebook Need a 'Sympathize' Button?

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By Chris Taylor2013-12-06 21:37:40 UTC

Maybe you too have had this experience: you're browsing Facebook and see a sad status update from an acquaintance or friend you've lost touch with. They've been fired; they've had a death in the family; maybe they just had a bad day.

You want to show that you care, but you don't know them well enough to say anything that doesn't sound trite. Then you see that someone has — perhaps accidentally — hit the Like button. Whatever you do, you think, don't be that guy.

One Facebook engineer has come up with a solution for such a situation: a Sympathize button. We learned this Thursday from Facebook's annual Compassion Research Day — yes, the social network devotes a whole day to sharing various ways it's trying to "build empathy and foster trust" with users. Engineer Dan Muriello revealed that one of his colleagues had designed the Sympathize button during a recent hackathon.

The Sympathize button would be hidden, in the anonymous engineer's conception, unless you add a negative emotion from Facebook's predetermined list. Once you did that, the Like button would disappear and Sympathize would replace it.

Facebook has no plans to incorporate the Sympathize button yet. "A lot of people were very excited about it, but we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product," Muriello told the audience. Then again, that was once true of the Like button itself, which also emerged as part of a hackathon.

"Some of our best ideas come from hackathons," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. "The many ideas that don’t get pursued often help us think differently about how we can improve our service."

We wouldn't rule out a future Sympathize button experiment from the company that likes to "move fast and break things." (Fun fact: the Sympathize button was first suggested in a 2012 blog post from SAP Vice President Vinay Iyer).

The question is: would that open the floodgates? Facebook users have demanded a Dislike button for years. For some, that would be a more appropriate response: expressing anger at the downturn in your friend's fortunes. And if you can Sympathize, why can't you Empathize? How about a button that says "Been There"?

You can watch Muriello discuss the Sympathize button in the video below, in response to a question — if you skip forward to 1:25:00. And let us know in the poll below which button you'd most like to see on the social network.