Twitter hearts might just be first in range of reaction emoji

Developer builds of the Twitter app appear to show the option to react with other characters like crying face and "100", just days after the site adopted hearts over stars

Many users were affected after the social network succumbed to one of its trademark outages (Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)

Twitter may be preparing to launch various "reaction emoji", just days after introducing "hearts" as the way that people recommend a post.

The site may soon give users the ability to react to a post by choosing from various different emoji, including crying faces, happy ones and the small "100 sign".

The change was spotted in an early developer build of Twitter. It may be that the site is testing the feature and will opt not to add it to the network, but it appears to have at least built it.

Twitter swapped the star-shaped favourite button that it has used since soon after it began for a heart-shaped like button last week.

Many quickly complained that the heart button was less ambiguous and so could lead to problems when trying to show appreciation for a sad or unfortunate tweet. It’s not clear whether Twitter is introducing the new emoji to allow for more variation on the ways that people can respond, or whether it had been planning to launch the various pictures when it introduced the heart-shaped one.

Twitter responded to requests for comment only with the monkey covering its mouth emoji.

The move appears to be an attempt to anticipate Facebook's move to a similar system. That is being introduced as a way of adding the much requested "dislike" button, but doing it in a way that

Twitter had already borrowed Facebook's wording for its new heart button, changing from referring to it as a "favourite" to calling it a "like".