Thumbs down; Facebook bin the famous digit for simpler ‘Like’ button

It took them six months to design this so brace yourself…

Since the dawn of Faceboook, the little thumb that indicated a ‘Like’ has been one of the company’s most iconic bits of branding, and the embedded 'thumb' button is used on 7.5million websites worldwide. The thumb will still appear in the rolling totals of likes, as you can see below. But now, the folks at Facebook have decided that it is time for a change, and this is what they have come up with. Yep, not much of a change is it. But the person behind the change, product manager Ling Bao, claims it wasn’t as simple as just deleting the thumb and writing the word 'Like'. Oh no. "It's not easy designing a button used by the whole Internet. This product has a lot of unique constraints, and is used by so many sites in different contexts." The redesign, which took a frankly incredible six months, will be rolled out across Facebook over the next few weeks but you can see above it is already in use here. Go on, give it a 'like' to test it out.