Snapchat has severely upped its game recently, going from an overwhelmingly popular yet fundamentally useless ephemeral photo-messaging app to providing its users with text chat and video call services, essentially bundling together the best qualities of WhatsApp and FaceTime to make it a hell of a lot more than than an app which allows people to share nudes of themselves (though it still does that, too).
Now it seems that Facebook wants a piece of that pie, as a report from the Financial Times states that the social networking giant is working on a Snapchat rival called Slingshot, which will allow users to take short videos of themselves which will be deleted after friends view them.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Facebook has wandered into Snapchat’s territory. In 2012 the company released Poke, which allowed users to send messages that would disappear after being viewed. However, Poke didn’t enjoy nearly as much success as Snapchat, quickly plummeting down Apple’s list of most-downloaded apps before slinking into irrelevancy.
Facebook then adopted the “if you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em” mentality, with Mark Zuckerberg offering Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel $3 billion for his company. Needless to say Spiegel didn’t accept the offer, and now Zuckerberg and Facebook will be hoping that Slingshot will prove to be just as popular as its competitor.
