Google and Facebook fight for your saved content

The two big giants have taken to slugging it out again, this time in the arena of your saved content. As you may already know, if you're looking through Facebook and you see something that interests you, such as a video, post or image for example, you can save it to go back and view again. 

You can then simply click on your Saved option in your left hand menu to see everything that you've saved. Nice and simple and a great way to shove more content under the virtual carpet until you forget you had it in the first place. Facebook is starting to partner with organisations outside of the company now, allowing you to save their material directly into your Facebook account. It's a nice idea, and it further ties you into using Facebook, because you're going to want to keep access to all of those nifty little links, right? It also weakens the hold of any third party tools such as Pocket which we've used in the past. 

Google has just rolled out their own extension Save to Google, which sits in Chrome allowing you to do the same thing. Just pop the icon up into the browser bar, and when you see something that you want to keep, just click. You'll get a nice little pull down menu:

As you can see you can choose a specific image to go with the saved page, and you can add a tag as well. When you need to see what you've previously saved, just click on the link, and up they come. 

Nice and simple. Of course, you've got to remember if you added that useful bit of information to Pocket, Google, Facebook, Pinterest or any of the dozens of other options available to you!

Comments

[Nate Hoffelder, editor of The Digital Reader]

I don't think this counts as "saving" content.

Google offers a bookmarking service. I tried it, and it doesn't "save" anything like Pocket or Instapaper would use the word.

I'll go give Facebook a shot, but I suspect that it works the same way.

Or am I nitpicking semantics?

[Phil Bradley]

It's a fair point Nate. It depends on what you mean by 'save' of course. In this case, it's in the same way that you save content when you bookmark it. So you're actually just saving the location somewhere convenient. But I do take your point entirely. :)

[Alex Rosin]

Great idea for Google and Facebook to let users 'save' external content, engaging users in new ways outside of search and social interaction.

As Nate mentioned, it's not true saving, but the ability to categorize/tag bookmarks will likely be enough for many users.

I tried Pocket (Read It Later back then) but ended up using Evernote which allows truly saving the content (exttracting both webpages and documents), making it possible to search across full text and has advanced categorization. Great tool but probably overkill for casual users.