Facebook testing new bookmarks/favorites feature to save great content

If you’ve ever wanted to save something you saw on Facebook and looked desperately for an email option, you can keep looking. Facebook isn’t adding anything that takes content or views outside of its nice little closed network.

But the world’s biggest social network is testing a new feature that would let you bookmark favorite content inside Facebook.

Facebook, of course, tests a lot of new features, as does its short-form cousin Twitter. This particular feature was discovered by tech blog MyTechSkool today, as Facebook likely picked users at random to test the feature on. Of course, just because the company is testing the feature doesn’t mean it will stick around.

But it would be an extremely helpful addition.

Right now, there’s no good way to search for your own posts on Facebook, and searching for updates that you remember from others is difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Being able to save key updates, posts, and photos in a list of top content would be very, very useful.

That’s essentially why bookmarks or favorites were invented for web browsers, after all. And while their use has diminished with the rise of Google — search is the new organization — Facebook search is not nearly as helpful.

Which means that finding something you saw once upon a time on Facebook is difficult. A bookmarks feature that allows you to save access to it within Facebook is a great idea. Users could, of course, simply choose to bookmark Facebook posts right in their browsers’ favoriting functionality, but that’s not nearly as useful, simply because most of the content you see in Facebook is embedded within the News Feed flow, and while it has an individual URL, users don’t see that unless they open it up in a new window.

Once they’ve saved something via the new bookmarks functionality, Facebookers can view links under the Apps menu and from there can also delete saved links once they’re no longer required.