14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is reportedly working to build its own Snapchat rival after it didn’t manage to purchase the company for over $1 billion.
According to the Financial Times, Facebook wants to build an app to offer ephemeral photos and video messaging for those who are particularly concerned about their privacy.
“Slingshot,” as it has been dubbed, is likely to be a standalone app that will work separately from other apps from the company, such as Facebook Messenger. The app isn’t exactly a copycat of Snapchat since there would really be no point in that and it would give Facebook a bad name.
Instead, users would need to tap or hold a friend’s profile picture in order to send a photograph or video clip. The content can only be viewed once, which means that it’s not based on a timer.
This isn’t the first time when Facebook has tried to create a tool similar to Snapchat. In fact, a couple of years ago, it released Poke after less than two weeks in development. The app enabled people to send messages with an expiration time expressed in seconds. Poke was actually killed a few weeks back since it never received any updates following the initial release.
After the company bought WhatsApp, a proper messaging tool, everyone thought that Facebook’s dreams to own Snapchat were gone. However, it looks like things aren’t so and Slingshot could be the response to Snapchat’s refusal of the offer.
It’s not exactly a surprise that Facebook wants to be a part of the trend of ephemeral messaging given the latest data on Snapchat’s growth. After all, it is the leading third-party messaging platform by volume in the United States and has been steadily growing in Europe as well, clearly setting down a big arrow towards what users want.
More importantly, however, such a tool is most appealing to teenagers who text at all times. At the same time, this age bracket hasn’t really been into Facebook in recent months as it used to be. Even if Facebook’s execs have denied that it’s not as big of a problem as everyone seems to think, the usage rates among teenagers has dropped considerably and the social network hasn’t come up with a solution on how to make this disappear.
It’s going to be interesting to see whether Slingshot will actually manage to attract users or it will sink.