New Facebook Feature To Compete Against Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability

The obvious typo by Gizmodo mixing up Instapaper and Instagram aside (an easy mistake to make), The Verge and iMore have reported that Marco Arment’s Instapaper has a new big competitor: Facebook.

Mobile Saving

On the mobile app, you simply need to hold your finger down on the post you want to save and a popup will appear. Tap the popup, and it will add the post to your ‘Saved’ folder.

To access your Saved folder, you must first scroll to the bottom of the sidebar menu and tap on Edit Favorites. Next, tap the + sign and select Saved from your list of Apps. Then tap Done. Now, you should see your Saved folder in the Favorites section of your sidebar menu!

Desktop Saving

Facebook is adding the save for later feature to both the mobile app and Facebook.com as well. The Verge picked up the news on the desktop version of the service.

We’ve now confirmed that the feature is also coming to the desktop version of Facebook. A ‘save’ button will feature beneath every update, and clicking it will send the article to a ‘saved’ subfolder inside your favorites.

Mass-market

I’m a big time Instapaper user and I’ve often considered what it would take for Arment’s service to reach mass-market. Maybe in the end the competitors for Instapaper will shave out the rest of the market.

Link saving is a service that many use, link reading seems more rare. Very few users go back and read the content they add to the services.

I frequently read on Twitter about users that jump from Instapaper to Pocket, or Pocket to Readability, or Readability to Instapaper hoping that they will read the articles saved into the new service. Spoiler: they don’t.

In the end it’s about the user more than the service. Regardless of where Pocket and Readability sit on the spectrum of light-end-users to pro-users, Facebook is most likely going to have the lightest.

Image Source: Flickr