Facebook Launches “Save” Feature

Facebook has now launched “Save”, a new feature that allows users to save content that they find in their Newsfeed to view later.  With this new functionality, Facebook may be well positioned as a popular DVR for Web content.

Services such as Pocket, Reading List in the Safari web browser, and Instapaper have been offering this type of feature for years now, but their popularity is still relatively low.  Facebook may well be the company to bring this type of functionality into popular use, and companies that have already been providing this type of service are likely to be feeling the threat of the availability of this new feature on Facebook.

“Every day, people find all sorts of interesting items on Facebook that they don’t have time to explore right away,” explained Daniel Giambalvo, a software engineer at Facebook.  “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.”

Users’ Saved items list is organized by category to allow for easy storing and sharing, and while saved items aren’t automatically shared with a user’s friends, that option is available.  Facebook’s Save feature will also remind a user of their saved items occasionally in their News Feed.  Users can choose to view their collected items from either mobile or desktop.  On mobile, a user’s saved items can be found in the “More” tab, and desktop users can click the link on the left-hand side of Facebook on the Web.

Facebook hired a small team of engineers in 2012 who had previously developed Spool, a free Google Android and Apple iOS app for smartphones and tablets that allowed users to save Web content to view later.  This team has now developed Save for Facebook, and the expectations for it to be a great success seem likely to come to fruition.  Facebook is already the gateway to the Web for a massive number of consumers, making it a top driver of traffic for all sizes of publishers.  A recent report from content discovery and sharing startup Shareaholic reveals the impressive statistic that Facebook now drives almost a quarter (23.39%) of overall traffic to sites, and this power appears to be on a continued rise.  Shareaholic’s analysis found that Facebook’s “share of traffic” went up 150.49% (14.05 percentage points) from 9.34% in June 2013.

Shareaholic’s report went even further to suggest that Facebook managed to steal share from some other top social networks, which collectively lost 1.97 percentage points from the first through the second quarters of the year, while Facebook increased its share 10.09% (2.14 percentage points) during the same period.