It is believed that social media site Facebook is designing a photo and video-sharing service to rival that of popular app Snapchat.
This comes following a failed bid from the social network to purchase the ephemeral messaging service for $3 billion towards the end of 2013. News suppliers believe that this immediately triggered the company to develop its own version, which will allegedly be called ‘Slingshot’ and may become commercially available as early as this month.
The social platform is no stranger to this type of technology, as it has already had a previous attempt at this form of service, named Poke. This app, similar to Snapchat, allowed users to send photos and videos to each other and once viewed, they would erase themselves permanently.
Poke was created in 2012, but has been recently withdrawn from online app stores, including iTunes, as it was not competing with the popularity of Snapchat, which has seen over 400 million messages sent since its inception.
However, it has been suggested that Slingshot would be the latest of Facebook’s standalone services, which also includes Facebook Messenger. This may come as part of the social site’s reputation management strategy, as it wishes to remain relevant and competitive against other social networks and has done this buy making a number of acquisitions for large amounts of money – including the purchase of photo sharing app Instagram in 2012 for £599 million and messaging service WhatsApp in February for £11 billion.
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