New Delhi, July 22 – Facebook on Monday announced a new feature called Save that will allow its users to collect web links from their newsfeed and store them so that they can read them later.
The feature sounds somewhat similar to service offered by apps like Pocket. But unlike the Pocket, which not only saves the web link but also fetches the web content, Facebook Save will only store links. In a way, Facebook Save is similar to Twitter Favourites, which is used by many users to collect web links that they can revisit later.
“Every day, people find all sorts of interesting items on Facebook that they don’t have time to explore right away. Now you can save items that you find on Facebook to check out later when you have more time.
You can save items like links, places, movies, TV and music. Only you can see the items you save unless you choose to share them with friends,” Facebook engineer Daniel Giambalvo wrote on the company’s official blog.
To save a link embedded in a post, Facebook users will have to click on the settings button for each post and then click on the Save link. Facebook said that the feature would be available to “everyone on iOS, Android and the web over the next few days”.
After enjoying unprecedented success in the last decade, in the last few years Facebook has faced heat from mobile apps and services like Twitter. This has forced Facebook to introduce some features that are already available to web users.
Last month, Facebook announced Slingshot, an app that allows users to exchange self-destructing photos videos. Slingshot is an attempt by Facebook to catch up to Snapchat, an app that has become incredibly popular among young smartphone users.
Before that in January, the company rolled out a feature called “trending topics” that showed users a list of topics popular on Facebook. Last year in June, it added support for hashtags.
Both trending topics and hashtags were an attempt to emulate similar features found on Twitter. Giambalvo wrote on the Facebook blog that “saved items list is organized by category”.
-INDIA TODAY
