Facebook emojis arrive. Put on a happy face - CNET

Facebook knows you have feelings, and it wants to help you share them with new symbols that represent a greater range of emotion than a "like" can manage.

The social networking giant said Wednesday that all of its users now have the option of choosing from a collection of new emoji-like "Reactions" to react to friends' posts with more nuanced emotion. The new symbols, which will augment rather than replace the iconic "like" button, represent expressions of love, laughter, happiness, shock, sadness and anger.

Facebook, which has been testing the new icons in Europe for a few months, says its members will appreciate a wider range of official icons than just the thumbs-up button to express their feelings about photos of your dinner, the latest political meme or news that another classic rocker has died.

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"News Feed is the central way we can get updates about our friends, family and anything else that matters most to us, and the central place to have conversations with the people you care about," Sammi Krug, Facebook product manager, wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday. "We've been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel."

Facebook, which already lures a fifth of the world's population each month, hopes the new emojis will help rope in even more users. Roughly 1.5 billion people use the service monthly to share and comment on events in each other's lives, and they use the "like" button a lot. But for many, the "like" button is a poor way to express sympathy when words otherwise escape us.