On Monday afternoon, the tech giant released the iOS app to some selected markets and hoped for the best. In case you don’t remember how Slingshot works, let us remind you: just like its enemy, it allows the users to sling back and forth photos and videos with their contacts.
The trick is that when you receive a snapshot or a video from a friend, you first have to sling something back to her / him in order to see what you received.
With this new product, Facebook aims to win over the much – desired clients’ niche: teenagers. They are very hooked on Snapchat, so Facebook wants a piece of the cake.
Snapchat’s growing popularity was founded on the premises that all media material self – destructs. As we all know by now, nothing actually disappears forever and for good, and Snapchat had its dark moments a few months ago trying to explain itself to the population. The leverage the Facebook Slingshot’s app has on Snapchat, as promised by Mark Zuckerberg, is that the Slingshot app indeed makes the photo / video content vanish in the thin air after one viewing only.
When we first talked about Facebook’s plans to release the Slingshot app, we were curious about the feedback users can give each other. In the mean time, we found out that there is indeed a “reaction” feature: with a simple tap you can snap a selfie and send it back to the one you received a photo or a video from. The selfie should capture your reaction upon opening the message.
While the Facebook Slingshot app and Snapchat have a lot of features in common, Facebook is very confident in its success. So confident in fact, that it released the app by accident on Monday. So here we arrived at the hottest part of the plot: an update on tech journals announced that the company released the app by mistake. In the words of a Facebook official,
Earlier today, we accidentally released a version of Slingshot, a new app we’re working on. With Slingshot, you’ll be able to share everyday moments with lots of people at once. It’ll be ready soon and we’re excited for you to try it out.
Piles of updates gathered in matter of hours, all reporting that the link to the iOS app was removed. So far, nobody knows exactly when the Facebook Slingshot app will have its second coming, therefore we will all have to wait for further news and leaks related to the Slingshot.