Facebook brings its Instapaper-like Save button to wider web

Facebook is rolling out its Instapaper-like bookmarking tool, Save, to the wider web.

When Facebook rolled out its Save button in July 2014, it offered an easy way for people to bookmark links posted in their news feeds to check out later. It was a Facebook-only version of read-it-later apps like Instapaper and Pocket.

With 250 million people using Save each month, now Facebook is rolling out its Save button to the wider web, the company’s head of platform, Deborah Liu, announced on Tuesday at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Francisco.

Based on a brief demo during the F8 keynote session, Facebook’s Save button seems to work a lot like Instapaper and Pocket. Sites that include it on their pages will let visitors store articles, products and other media to their Facebook accounts. Then, whenever someone wants to check out that archived content, they’ll be able to find it in the same Saved section on Facebook’s site or in its mobile app.

Depending on how much data Facebook is able to collect from each save — and how much of that is data Facebook isn’t already collecting — extending the Save button web-wide could give Facebook an even better idea of the content that people are interested in and that Facebook should show in their news feeds. Facebook already has a pretty good idea based on the content people interact with in their news feeds. But the articles, products and other content people save to view later could serve as another strong signal of someone’s interests, especially if that and associated interests aren’t something that Facebook would otherwise be privy to.

Check out Liu’s demo of the Save button’s web version below.