Facebook users in the US can now share their Collections with friends

By Brittany Roston/

If you're a faithful Pinterest user, there's a good chance you've completely forgotten about a competing product: Facebook Collections. This tool, as its name suggests, allows users to collect content in their own private Collections, but with limitations that no doubt reduced its popularity compared to Pinterest. That is changing with a quiet update that enables users to share their Collections with friends.

In its present form, Facebook users can create Collections by going to the URL "https://www.facebook.com/saved" (or clicking the "Saved" menu option), then clicking the 'Create Collection' button. By default, only the user can access their Collection, which can be used to store things they've found on Facebook and want to keep access to — recipe videos, editorial posts, and similar things.

Users are able to add specific friends to their Collection if they want, but that's still a fairly large restriction compared to how competing services like Pinterest work. A quiet update to the feature, however, changes that and enables users to share their Collections publicly on their Facebook. Other users are now able to view the shared Collections and 'Follow' them for updates.

It appears that this is only a test at this time — I can't access the feature, for example, but some other users can, as demonstrated in the video above. With this new feature, Facebook Collections becomes much more of a Pinterest alternative, though it's hard to imagine that it will ever replace the popular board-based platform.

It's unclear how many users have access to the sharing feature at this time and whether Facebook plans to promote Collections heavily once it introduced this new tool. Facebook told TechCrunch that the new feature is rolling out to users in the US first.

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