14 DAY TRIAL // During the Facebook F8 Developer Conference 2016, taking place in San Francisco on April 12 and 13, Facebook announced lots of goodies, among which a new feature called the "Save to Facebook" button.
Just like its older brothers, the Like, Send, and Share to Facebook buttons, the new Save button can be added to any page with the help of a simple JavaScript snippet.
Once embedded on a website, when users press it, the current page's URL will be taken and recorded to that user's Facebook account, as a link inside their "Saved" section.
Save to Facebook button will send content to Facebook's Saved section
The Saved section has existed for a while on the social network, but until now, users could send content to that section only if it was already shared on Facebook. This meant that you had to publish something on your profile, or someone would have to share a link or image on Facebook in order for you to be able to save it to your account.
With the new Save to Facebook button, Facebook is trying to muscle in on the once-dead market of link bookmarking. This market hit its peak almost a decade ago with the del.icio.us service, eventually bought by Yahoo, but it collapsed after a few years.
It recently started making a comeback thanks to services like Pocket (formerly Read It Later), Instapaper, Readability and Safari’s "Read Later" feature.
Save to Facebook is a sub-standard attempt at a link bookmarking tool
Zuckerberg's marketing staff immediately picked up on the resurgence of the link hoarding trend, and now, the company is providing its own bastard implementation as well.
As it stands right now, the only good parts Save to Facebook has over its competition is Facebook's immense userbase, lacking the ability to tag links and organize entries in multiple folders/lists.
But don't count Facebook out just yet. As we know the company's developers, it will be probably a matter of time until this is corrected. A fully usable product would have been nice, though.
To get developers started, check out the company's documentation for its new Save to Facebook button.
At F8, Facebook also announced Account Kit, a phone number-based universal login system, and "bots for Messenger," a tool that lets companies build AI-powered chat bots for the Facebook Messenger IM platforms. For other products Facebook launched yesterday, check out our F8 day one summary.
