Facebook is not the greatest source if you’re looking for breaking news. That’s what Twitter does best. The thing is, Zuckerberg doesn’t want to leave it that way. So Facebook has been trying to shape-shift into the something which is a cross between an online newspaper and a social network.
Think about it, when you get all the headlines and updates from friends on one page itself, why would you go to any other source? The company’s latest venture is reported to be a read-it-later feature which lets users save an article in their News Feed so that they can go through it later.
MyTechSkool tipped off AllThingsD on this addition which is denoted by a bookmark button when it pops up beside a post in News Feed. On clicking this icon, the concerned link will be collected under ‘Saved’ in the user’s apps menu and tattooed with the time at which it was bookmarked.
A Pew Research Center survey claimed that Facebook was the first choice for finding news of only 4% respondents. Maybe this will help? The feature is apparently still in the testing stage. But it’s not the first time the social network was caught playing around with it. Last year, a similar experiment was noticed on the mobile version of the site as well as iOS.
Of course, the Facebook read-it-later function will not attempt to act as a threat to Twitter only. Applications like Readability, Pocket and Instapaper may also stand to lose some of their audiences if and when the tool is launched.