Facebook sure doesn't give up easily. Several months after the social network failed to acquire disappearing video chat app Snapchat, Facebook is reportedly back in the game with its own ephemeral messaging app to take another swipe at self-destructing messages.
A report by the Financial Times says Mark Zuckerberg himself is supervising the development of Slingshot, a new app that Facebook hopes will give Snapchat a run for its money. Facebook declined to comment, but if the report is true, Slingshot will be a standalone app and will not sync with the main Facebook and Messenger apps.
Details on Facebook's new stab at send-it-then-forget-about-it video chat app are slim at the moment, but it will most likely use a simple mechanism to type text, take photos and record videos before sending the message and waiting for it to vanish into thin air forever. The new app will reportedly debut next month, but no one at Facebook has approved its launch yet.
The report comes only a few days after Facebook discontinued Poke, a Facebook feature that many have described as essentially a Snapchat rip-off. Poke was launched in 2012 and took its name from an older feature from Facebook's collegiate days. The app never gained traction but it stayed on the app stores more than a year before Facebook finally took it down. In an interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said Poke was "more of a joke" to the company.
"A few people built it as a hackathon thing, and we made one release and then just kind of abandoned it and haven't touched it since," he said.
If Facebook doesn't take ephemeral messaging too seriously, it sure doesn't look like it. In November last year, Facebook made a whopping $3 billion offer to acquire Snapchat, which currently has more than 100 million users and sends more than 350 million disappearing messages every day. The two-year-old startup said it was exploring funding that valued the company at $4 billion.
Snapchat founder and chief executive 23-year-old Evan Spiegel, considered the next tech wonder kid, said he was not considering acquisitions or investments and believes that Snapchat's exponential growth will propel the company to massive success, though the startup has reported neither revenue nor a timetable for revenue.
"There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this. I think trading that for some short-term gain isn't very interesting," said the young CEO.
His strategy isn't unfamiliar. Back when Facebook was a fledgling startup growing out of its founder's dorm room, Zuckerberg himself famously rejected a $1 billion bid by Yahoo when Facebook was two years old, the same age as when Snapchat turned down an offer that could have given Spiegel a $750 million windfall.
Pew Research Center's Internet Project reports that around 9% of mobile users in the U.S. use Snapchat. Most of them are teenagers, a demographic known to be using Facebook less and less.
