Above: Pocket's new Explore tool.
Pocket, the company behind the app for saving articles and other content, today launched Explore, a way to browse through and search for things that people have saved inside the app. The information is anonymized, so you can't see who saved what, but you can get a sense of what lots of users have put in their individual Pockets.
You'll find headers to look through, and once you've searched for something, you can navigate to related topics. There's also a layer of curated content recommendation through the Pocket Hits function that's brought to you by Pocket's editors.
"For the first time, we are opening up Pocket's understanding of what's good and worthwhile on the Internet, and making it easy for anyone to search and discover the best of the best on any topic. No Pocket account necessary," Pocket product marketing manager Kait Gaiss wrote in a blog post.
The introduction of Explore builds on the Recommended feature of the app, where you can see the "best of Pocket" and things "you may have missed," trending content, and recommendations from Pocket users whom you follow. But this is arguably more impactful because it takes the advantage of the intelligence of Pocket's millions of users and exposes it to anyone.
Also today, Pocket launched an enhancement to its Chrome extension — now when you save something, you'll see related recommendations instead of just being informed that you've succeeded in saving it. Plus, it's now possible to have Pocket recommend three "trending stories" whenever you open a new tab in Chrome. "Trending topics" are listed as well.
Pocket announced a $7 million funding round last year.
Update at 11:21 a.m. Pacific: Added information about how Explore is anonymized.