Twitter Working on “Save for Later” Bookmarks

Years and years and years ago, I came across the original Instapaper app and was dismayed that there wasn’t an Android version (yet). Looking for alternatives, I turned to Read It Later, which has since rebranded as Pocket. I use it to save all sorts of stuff from the web that I want to read or reference later. It’s convenient and so much better than regular bookmarks, largely because of the cloud-syncing stuff.

A lot has changed in the several years since I first started using Read It Later. Facebook has its own built in “Saved” feature that lets you save any post for later reference. Facebook-owned Instagram has a similar private bookmarking feature that you can access within the mobile app (but not yet on the web for some reason). And now, it looks like Twitter is also working on bookmarks that you can “save for later.”

Currently, the simplest and most common way to bookmark a tweet is to “like” it. This works, but it also comes with two rather glaring problems. The first is, if your Twitter profile is public, your likes are also public. People can see what you’re saving/liking on your account. Second, “liking” a tweet implies some level of endorsement. What if you want to save a tweet that you actually disagree with? You don’t want to give people the wrong impression.

And then there’s the problem of separating tweets that you “like” because you like them and tweets that you “like” just because you want to save them. A separate mechanism to save for later just makes sense and is long overdue.

The people at Twitter are actively working on the new feature, so the exact details may change before actual implementation. You can see a quick demo on @jesarshah’s feed. She’s a product manager at Twitter and the video demo shows what it looks like in the mobile app. Presumably, the web interface would be similar.