While most tweets are a quick read, a lot of people still want a way to save those worthy of a more in-depth inspection. After getting tons of requests for a "Save for Later" feature, the company has finally started developing a Bookmarking tool during its annual Hack Week activities. Twitter product manager Jesar Shah has announced the feature on the platform and posted a quick demo of the prototype they created at the event.
Mariella Moon
The feature appeared in my account sometime in the past week, but curiously only when I’m using Twitter Lite, their new mobile website; there’s no sign of bookmarking in either the regular desktop site or in the official iOS app. As the article above mentions, this experiment replaces the ‘send via direct message’ icon with a new menu, which includes the option to add the tweet to bookmarks. There is also a new entry in the profile menu for Bookmarks, where you can access your saved tweets.
News from the #SaveForLater team! We’ve decided to call our feature Bookmarks because that's a commonly used term for saving content and it fits nicely alongside the names of the other features in the navigation. pic.twitter.com/cQ0X1PHlsR
— Tina 🇨🇭🇯🇵 (@tinastsh) November 22, 2017
Overall I think it’s a good idea to be able to save tweets privately. In many cases I ‘like’ tweets just to save them for later reading, especially on mobile, or to keep them around in case I will link to them in future blog posts – also the links from my likes are automatically saved to my Refind account. It should also help alleviate some of the confusion caused by the fact that sometimes Twitter’s algorithm shows your likes in the timelines of followers; saved tweets will most likely remain for your eyes only. It would be a daunting task, but I would love to clean up my likes and transfer important links to Bookmarks. But for now I will not invest the time to do so, since the feature is not yet officially launched and could change or disappear at any moment.
On the down side, as I was using it it, I kept noticing how fragmented Twitter’s menus and options are across different clients: you can add tweets to moments from the desktop site and mobile app, but not from Twitter Lite; Bookmarks are Lite-only for now; and TweetDeck offers neither of these newer features, instead showing a menu for ‘adding to collection’. This can only lead to confusion for users, so I hope Twitter decides to make the experience more consistent.
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