Facebook Slingshot: Is This The New Challenger for Snapchat?

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facebook-slingshot-app

Finally, Facebook introduced its latest app called Slingshot. While the app is focused its services on trading photos and videos, social media virtuoso often billed it as the next “Snapchat killer”.

Slingshot is available on iOS and Android. The app is created by Facebook Creative Labs and it will be expected to join on the photo and video sharing media battlefield soon.

The app’s mechanism itself is quite unique, where users need to reply with a photo or video in order to see a photo or video sent to them by a friend. The photos or videos sent can have text added either right over the image or as a caption. Plus, just like Snapchat, you can also draw doodles on the images. However, the drawing feature has a nice touch and much better than most color and pen width selectors in other apps. There’s even music that plays while your drawing on photos.

The app is simple and full of small gizmos. When a photo is sent, it shrinks down to the bottom center of the screen and launches off the screen like a tiny rocket. The interface is relatively easy and simple enough to follow. It looks like the developer of the app struggle hard to fulfill the app’s tagline: “An app where everyone is a creator and no one is a spectator.”

Overall, Slingshot is not a “100% original idea”. While it borrows many features from other well known apps like Vine (videos loop), Instagram (the videos can be up to 15 seconds long), and disappearing images like Snapchat, it promises a fun experience shared as well.

Still, the app is facing a big challenge with the previous “Snapchat killer-wannabe”, Poke, has sunk into eternal slumber along with Facebook’s Camera app. Slingshot must get a lot of engagement, otherwise it will face the same fate as its aforementioned predecessors.