Will Slingshot Come Back to Haunt Facebook?

Facebook, the social media giant, has been attempting to develop their own photo messaging system to compete with SnapChat.

SlingShot is now available for Android and iOS. SnapChat allows users to take a photograph, and send it to other users. After a few seconds, the picture deletes itself. Slingshot does not allow recipients to view the image they were sent until they compose a message in return.

Snapchat recently unveiled some additions to their own system. “Our story” is a system that allows multiple people at an event to share the SnapChat images into a single stream. This give-and-take could encourage entire photo conversations, as opposed to the single photos common with the older program.

Development of Slingshot has been the subject of rumors since May. On June 9th, the application was accidentally made available in some app stores, before being removed from sale.

Yahoo may also be ready to jump into the market. They recently purchased Blink, another application similar to SnapChat and SlingShot.

In 2012, Facebook launched their own stand-alone photo-sharing application called Poke. The company boasted the system only took 12 days to design, but it never became popular.

SnapChat provides some privacy for images through the automated self-destruct feature on the photos. But SlingShot does not provide a message to the sender when the image they sent was recorded in a screen capture.

As young people spend more time using social media services like SnapChat, InstaGram and Vine, corporations are beginning to take notice. McDonalds, Taco Bell and Heineken have all recently rolled out photo-sharing accounts.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/228266/snapchat-launches-our-story-

builds-community-pe.html

http://www.todayonline.com/tech/facebook-relaunches-second-snapchat-clone

http://www.sling.me

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2459646,00.asp

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/facebook-slingshot-messaging-snapchat,news-19009.html