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Twitter developing bookmarks so users can save items for later

The extra functionality does away with using retweets, DMs or the red heart as a workaround.
The extra functionality does away with using retweets, DMs or the red heart as a workaround. The extra functionality does away with using retweets, DMs or the red heart as a workaround.

Twitter is to add a bookmark feature to allow users to privately save a story for reading later.

The extra functionality came about after a company-wide HackWeek project.

Company officials have been sharing details on the social network and now want to garner feedback.

Keith Coleman, vice president of product, confirmed details admitting it was a “top request” from users.

Senior director of product Sriram Krishnan told followers: “We are working on #SaveForLater. As someone who reads a lot on Twitter, I’m so excited for this.”

Product manger Jesar Shah confirmed requests had come from “many of you (especially in Japan!)”.

She later shared a gif of what the roll out could look like. “Add to bookmarks” would be an option on the additional three dots menu, rather than contained in the prime real estate under a tweet.

That could change as people offer their thoughts about how #SaveForLater should work.

The introduction will remove the ambiguity some users have found by using retweets or the red heart favourite icon as a version of a bookmark.

Those workarounds could give the impression of people endorsing a statement or point of view when it was really a curiosity save. Others were sending tweets to themselves via direct message to read later.

Liked tweets started to receive extra attention when recent changes by Twitter meant a user’s followers would see them in their feed.

While the new functionality has been welcomed, some say the development shows the techie gulf between Twitter and other social media platforms.

On the same day, Facebook was showing off a virtual reality tool which saw founder Mark Zuckerberg “in” Puerto Rico.

The latest addition comes just weeks after Twitter increased the tweet limit for some users from 140 to 280 characters.

A roll out date has not yet been suggested.