Facebook launches dedicated button for sharing text quotes in the News Feed

At its F8 developer conference in San Francisco today, Facebook is announcing a new way for users to clip quotes they like on the Web and then share them in a clean and neat way in the News Feed.

For many years, people have dropped images of quotes right into the News Feed, but the new option looks more native — it’s raw text.

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“We have special content types around songs and albums or fitness, like runs,” Facebook product manager Eddie O’Neil told VentureBeat in an interview. Quotes are just the newest option.

Developers will need to add this plugin to their websites in order to get this functionality. From there, after people highlight text, they can click the “Share Quote” button, preview the automatically generated post with a link to the article, optionally add a comment on top, and then share it. Out it goes.

The technology is somewhat reminiscent of OneShot, the iOS app for sharing screenshots of text on Twitter. But all you get with that is an image, and it’s not cross-platform.

“Quote sharing is supported in the share dialog on iOS, Android, and mobile/desktop web,” Facebook software engineer Ming Li wrote in a blog post. “We also offer a button for easily sharing quotes from web pages.”