Facebook is reportedly building a new ephemeral messaging app called Slingshot and might release it this month! Now Snapchat has got a new rival.
We know Snapchat declined Facbook’s buying proposal about 6 months ago. Facebook was willing to cash in $3 billion for Snapchat acquisition. But Snapchat’s CEO said that they’re not interested in selling Snapchat for a short term gain.
And then, we know that Yahoo bought Blink, also an ephemeral messaging service, very recently and will shut it down in the next few weeks. Since Blink was also “send and forget” kinda self-destructing messaging app, it was considered a rival to Snapchat – it was doing quite well on both the Android and iOS market.
Yahoo was actually interested in the team behind Blink and so it ditched the actual app.
Facebook too recently ditched its app “Poke” which was almost a clone of Snapchat.
Now, Yahoo ditching Blink and Facebook discontinuing Poke were good news to Snapchat since there were 2 competitors down. This meant more new users to Snapchat.
But now, Facebook is reportedly building an ephemeral messaging app and it seems Mark Zuckerberg is personally supervising the app’s development. The app could be launched this month.
Snapchat’s popularity should have motivated this move of Facebook. According to the stats, Snapchat is used by 9% of the cellphone users and it is seriously pulling people off Facebook because of its heavy usage. Besides, ephemeral messaging is gaining popularity given its privacy and safety aspects of messaging.
Facebook doesn’t want its users to leave for another ephemeral messaging system so it is launching its own. And we assume Slingshot will be integrated within Facebook and will be compatible with Facebook messenger as well.
Will Slingshot pick up people’s interest? Let’s see.