These days, sharing a link on Facebook is about as simple as it gets. The majority of web sites we visit have a plethora of social media buttons so you can share, follow, tweet, +1, Pin and put it in your Pocket. Personally, I’m a copy-and-paste guy myself. Drop the link in your status box, a preview with the link is generated, and boom! You’re good to go.
Facebook has taken it one step further and created an official Chrome extension that allows you to share from any webpage directly to your Facebook with a simple click of a button. While this may seem like a redundancy, it does take all of the different ways to share a page and places them in one neat little place, without the hassle of scraping and pasting if you happen to be on a site that is without social media icons.
In addition to the share extension, Facebook has created a Pocket style extension that will allow you to save external web pages to your “saved link” list inside your Facebook. I use the save feature inside of Facebook frequently. Since Facebook sponsored links are tailored to the user, I frequently come across technology, music and food articles I would like to read but don’t have the time at the moment. Facebook will even occasionally remind you that you have saved articles just in case you forgot to check back on them. Pretty handy little feature.
Now, with the save option, if you come across an article you want to save specifically to Facebook or share with a FB friend later, you can click the save button and keep moving right along. While I don’t think this is really geared at competing with Apps like Pocket, it certainly would be a viable replacement if you chose to do so. The only drawback would be the extra step of accessing Facebook to see your saved links. But, let’s be honest, we’re probably going to be on Facebook at some point if we are on the web.