Facebook Developing New Snapchat Competitor, May Launch This Month

Sunday May 18, 2014 6:05 PM PDT by Richard Padilla
Facebook is building a new app that will serve as a direct competitor to Snapchat, according to a report from the Financial Times. The project, which is codenamed "Slingshot", will enable users to send each other pictures or short video messages through a simplified, grid-based interface similar to the one seen in messaging app TapTalk. Like Snapchat, photos and videos can only be taken in real time, and messages disappear after a specified time limit.

taptalk_facebook
Facebook's new ephemeral messaging app is said to resemble TapTalk (pictured above)

Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg is said to be personally overseeing the project, with Slingshot's development coming after Facebook attempted to buy Snapchat for $3 billion last year. The news also follows Facebook's removal of its long defunct Facebook Poke app from the App Store earlier this month, which was the company's first answer to Snapchat. Originally launched in December of 2012, Poke allowed users to send ephemeral photos, videos, text messages, and "poke" notifications to their friends.

According to the report, Slingshot could be released as early as this month on mobile platforms. Facebook previously launched its news content and curation app Paper this past February. The app was the first product to come out of Facebook's Creative Labs initiative.

Tag: ft.com
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djtech42
75 months ago
So Facebook, the biggest data mining company (besides Google, possibly), is creating an app that supposedly allows you to send content "temporarily."

HAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face. :D :rolleyes:
Rating: 15 Votes
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clayj
75 months ago
Maybe Facebook should consider restoring the Most Recent view to the News Feed -- rather than forcing us to use some convoluted workaround in the More screen -- in the actual Facebook app FIRST.
Rating: 14 Votes
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joshwenke
75 months ago
This will fail and Snapchat will dominate. End of story.
Rating: 8 Votes
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electorate
75 months ago
It's interesting to see that Facebook is willing to have another poke at Snapchat..
Rating: 6 Votes
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joshuaclinton
75 months ago
Facebook: The Samsung of social media.
Rating: 4 Votes
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The Doctor11
75 months ago

Facebook: The Samsung of social media.


Yup your dead on. But at least Samsung try's to copy something worth copying...
Rating: 3 Votes
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C DM
75 months ago
Didn't they do this already with Poke (they that just recently pulled)?
Rating: 3 Votes
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joneill55
75 months ago

This will fail and Snapchat will dominate. End of story.


True that..... and I look forward to the day when fb reaches "MySpace" status :-)
Rating: 2 Votes
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Glassed Silver
75 months ago
The way I understood it is that there's a strong emphasis on having your content be temporary on Snapchat.
Whether or not it's bulletproof, it's most prominently popular for "enabling" to forget your worries about some content you may send.

Linking these use cases to a data mining company like Facebook seems like what most users would like to explicitly avoid.

Glassed Silver:mac
Rating: 2 Votes
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darkslide29
75 months ago
Just wanted to echo the already-said sentiment that the point of Snapchat is anonimity - we at least hope anything shared has truly has disappeared. But to trust a data-mining company to do this?

To trust Facebook, it is laughable. They have no reputation or reason to be trusted. It would be like Snapchat by google and being surprised to hear they collected statistics and the like for advertising. There would be no shocker there.

Facebook is in the same business. Why else would they be doing this? Charity?
Rating: 1 Votes
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