Facebook is developing a ‘sympathize’ 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 ‘sympathize’ 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 ‘sympathize’ 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 sympathize with this,” instead of “five people ‘like’ this”.