At its F8 keynote, Facebook took the time to remind the world of a feature it introduced to the social networking service four years ago, its Save button. Facebook’s Save button allows users to save content they find on their news feed like links to news articles, videos and the like for reading or viewing later. The company plans to remove the feature from its obscurity and spread it all across the web. For a moment, that seemed like Facebook seriously planning to make a dent in the fortunes of other applications that have offered read-it-later functionality like Instapaper and Pocket. Now, it looks like Google is out to do the same to it.
Google won’t just sit there and watch as Facebook eats up the main source of its revenue streams, the world wide web, where its advertising products and search service have been the go-to products and services for so long. Google silently launched a Chrome extension, Save to Google, to make it easier to save links and images for accessing and viewing later. The saved links and photos can be accessed at a user’s convenient time on google.com/save.
At Google I/O last year, then Google Senior Vice President for Chrome and Android, Sundar Pichai, revealed that the Chrome browser had 1 billion users. At F8, Facebook said that its Save button had 250 million users. Facebook will be giving its Save button more prominence not just on the social network but all over the web, hoping to leverage on its 1.6 billion strong user base. It will be interesting to see how these two giants battle it out.
