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Pocket Moves Into Twitter Territory?

16649920968_d5897023f3_hThe Verge has a story that has me stumped (I don’t see why it’s newsworthy).

Pocket, the service for saving articles and videos to view later, is starting to look a bit more like a social network. The company is now testing a way for you to share your favorite items to a public profile, which others can follow to see your picks in a feed of recommended items. Your saved items are still private by default, but you can now choose to broadcast favorite pieces with your followers. …

Still, Pocket won’t show you everything your friends share. "This feed isn’t Twitter or Flipboard," Weiner says. "It’s not time-ordered, and it doesn’t include every possible article from the sources that you follow. The goal with recommendations is to bring you the very best of the web without the noise."

Pocket already had sharing options for all the major social networks, and it offers RSS feeds for unread/all items/archived links. And through IFTTT you can micromanage the link sharing to your heart’s content (forex: only sharing links with a certain tag).

So what does this new option ad, besides an algorithmic filter that is intended to only show me the best?

One, that sounds more like Facebook than Twitter, but in any case thanks, but no thanks.

I don’t need or want software to second-guess what someone chooses to share. They chose to share it, so I want to see it. If I want a filter I will set one up.

The new more social sharing option is being rolling out today in a public beta on Android and iOS. To use the features, you’ll need to join Pocket’s beta testing program.

image by GotCredit

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