Facebook Tries To Conquer Snapchat

Facebook has showed its intention to conquer the social world again by launching a photo-messaging app.

Just one week after accidentally releasing the app on Apple’s App Store, it has now been officially launched in hope of becoming the next big thing in photo-sharing.

The app, known as Slingshot, differs from what is already out there slightly in that the only way you can ‘unlock’ the photo your friend has sent you, is by sending them one back, or ‘sling-it’ back.

Similar to Snapchat though, once the image has been viewed, it gets deleted. Another similarity is that you can also scribble or type all over the photos, something you can also do on Snapchat.

The creators of the app said this on their social media page: “Slingshot was built so that everybody is a creator and nobody feels like just a spectator.”

In 2012, Facebook purchased the photo-sharing network Instagram for a figure said to be around the £589 million mark, and today they are using their knowledge from this to create an app that they think will gain more users than its nearest competitor Snapchat.

Facebook had tried to create a similar app before called Poke, but this was abandoned recently and had been labelled by many as a ‘copy-cat app’. Facebook created Poke after being snubbed by Snapchat when they offered them $3 billion to buy the company. Slingshot has been given a number of different features that other apps don’t have to avoid being given the ‘copycat’ label again.

For Facebook users, it is simple to download the app and login using your normal logins but for those that do not have a Facebook account, you can sign up without having to create a new account.  All the new users will need is their mobile number so that they can connect with friends in their contact list, something that is also very similar to Snapchat.

It will be interesting to see how well Slingshot will do, given its similarities to Snapchat, and whether it will claim the crown of being the best instant photo-sharing app of today.