Positioning itself as a DVR for Web content, Facebook just launched Save -- a feature that allows users to save anything they find in their News Feed for later.
“Now you can
save items that you find on Facebook to check out later when you have more time,” Daniel Giambalvo, a software engineer at Facebook, explained in blog post. “You can save items like links,
places, movies, TV and music.”
Given Facebook’s immense size, Save immediately threatens more established content-savers like Pocket -- formerly know as Read It Later --
and Instapaper.
While what users choose to save is not immediately shared with “friends,” Facebook’s new feature does offer that option. Users’ Saved items
list is organized by category for easy storing and sharing. The feature will send occasional reminders of users’ saved items in their News Feed.
With Save, users can also view their
collected items from any platform, be it mobile or desktop. To do so, users need only go to their saved items in the “More” tab on mobile, or by clicking the link on the left-hand side of
Facebook on the Web.
Save was co-developed by a small team of engineers that Facebook hired in 2012. They had previously built Spool -- a free Google Android and Apple iOS app for
smartphones and tablets that let user save Web content for later viewing.
The gateway to the Web for million of consumers, Facebook is already a top driver of traffic for publishers
of all shapes and sizes. The social giant now drives nearly a quarter (23.39%) of overall traffic to sites, a according to a new report from content discovery and sharing startup Shareaholic.
Facebook’s traffic-driving powers only appear to be growing. Over the last year, Shareaholic found, the social network’s “share of traffic” skyrocketed -- up
150.49% (14.05 percentage points) from 9.34% in June 2013.
By increasing its share 10.09% (2.14 percentage points) from the first through the second quarters of the year, Shareaholic
suggested that Facebook even managed to steal share from other top social networks, which collectively lost 1.97 percentage points.