Facebook has confirmed that it has quietly started to test a “Watch Later” button for videos on the desktop — a little tab that appears as an overlay in the upper right corner of the video when you pass your mouse over it, or scroll past it — to get you to save and consume more of the videos that appear in your feed.
The new feature puts Facebook’s video user experience more on par with that of YouTube, Facebook’s great rival in the category. YouTube also offers a “Watch Later” feature for its videos (seen here on the right).
Facebook’s Watch Later comes almost exactly a year after Facebook rolled out Save, an Instapaper-like feature to tag links to articles, places and media so that you can look at them later. As with saved stories and other links, videos you tag to Watch Later get collated in your “Saved” folder, which appears in the left column on desktop and in the “More” menu on mobile.
Watch Later goes a step beyond what Facebook was doing before, and as an option for videos it is much more more direct. The “save” option was originally launched in two places: as a button in the lower right corner, and in the drop-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner of a post.
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