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Snapchat is a growing social media app with billions of fans and a series of new and improved features that are indeed hard to compete with. In the world of ephemeral apps, Snapchat wasn’t quite the most honest and transparent player of them all, but it managed to woo and hook its fans so bad, they let Snapchat’s little sins dissipate into thin air.
Snpachat’s success didn’t slip unnoticed and the tech behemoth Facebook made them a $3 billion purchase offer last year. Unfortunately, Snapchat wanted to play solo and turned down Facebook’s deal.
As we all know, Facebook is not the kind of company to let things go so easily, especially when a fierce competitor is feeding on its demographics. Therefore, recent reports suggest that Facebook aims to put down Snapchat with the Slingshot. The latter is a photo / video sharing app just like Snapchat that is assumed to be under development as we speak. They say Mark Zuckerberg itself is supervising the building of the Slingshot app. The tech giant knows very well that it lost the teenage group over to Snapchat, so it is making sustained efforts to recover its position, gain new followers and end the reign of Snapchat.
According to Tim Bradshaw and Hannah Kuchler from the Financial Times,
The latest effort to take on Snapchat comes despite Facebook’s subsequent acquisition of WhatsApp Messenger, another popular chat app with more than 500m regular users, for an initial outlay of $14.6bn in cash and stock, based on Friday’s closing price. Analysts see the fast rise of simple messaging apps, such as WeChat, Line and KakaoTalk, as one of Facebook’s biggest competitive threats, especially among younger users, where the social network has admitted it is seeing some signs of declining usage.
So what does Slingshot has on Snapchat?
Well, not much, some would say, but we find its main feature quite interesting: Slingshot is said to sport the ability to make shared photos and videos disappear after only one view. If this doesn’t appeal to the ones obsessed with anonymity and safety, nothing does. In all fairness, making content vanish without any control of what to keep and what to delete is not so fun, but we are not the ones to judge.
There is little official information on the Slingshot up to this point. They say that
Slingshot is likely to stand alone from Facebook Messenger, its popular texting app, as part of Mr Zuckerberg’s strategy of unbundling the group’s social network into standalone mobile services,
but that is pretty much all we know. It is possible to have the app available by the end of the month, yet, we will have to pay attention to the upcoming news related to this subject. All in all, Facebook aims to put down Snapchat with the Slingshot and all we have to do is wait and see what happens next.
