Slingshot, Facebook’s new mobile messenger
Facebook has been trying to tap into the messaging world for the past 1-2 years, the main reason behind being more people being attracted to communicate via messaging apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber rather than Facebook, this is especially popular amongst the teenagers and young crowd which seek for more quicker and easier way of messaging.
Facebook is worried that this rise of the messaging cult will threaten Facebook with more teenagers leaving Facebook these days for messaging apps than joining them. Facebook tried to polish it’s messenger app but it never got the popularity amongst the the young crowd. The simplicity of messaging apps which only needs seconds to join and will only need a phone number to register than filling some robust information on Facebook.
Facebook try to buy all the competitors that they thought will one day threaten their domination, they bought instagram which was gaining popularity amongst the young crowd. They bought whatsapp that was adding reached the number of users faster than Facebook reached the same number of users when they bought whatsapp. They also tried to by snapchat, which snapchat refused.
Then Facebook tried to beat snapchat in their own game by releasing poke, a messaging app that was similar to whatsapp, but failed to gain any traction amongst the target audience. So Facebook’s newest go at beating SnapChat is a new messaging app called Slingshot.
Slingshot is in a way similar to Snapchat but before you can open the message that someone had sent you, you have to reply to the message with a photo or a video. Only after that you’ll be able to see the message that your friend has sent you.
It’s relatively new app with still 10,000 - 50,000 downloads, and also with a moderate rating of 3.6. Whether Slingshot will be able to tap in to snapchat marketspace and defeat it will be something that we have to wait and see. If you are interested you can download Slingshot by visiting http://sling.me
Beyond Slingshot?
It’s reasonable to see Facebook going after another messenger app to beat the growth of snapchat, but do we need another chat app is something that we have to think again.
There are plenty of chat apps out there that fits most of our needs, and we’ve come to a situation where companies are trying to makes small changes a chat app and release it as a whole new product, but in the end they are also just another chat app that does basically the same thing, chatting. It’s same as 5-6 years back where everyone was trying to make the next big social network, but in the end they also did the same thing that existing social networks did. Social networking.
What will be the next big thing is something that’s yet to be seen, messaging has been there in the forms of IRC and IM for sometime before Facebook and social networking. However messaging came as the next big thing after Facebook and social networking in a new form as mobile apps that was easier to use by everyone not like IRC and IM and also easier to set up unlike Facebook.
So this goes to show that the next big thing doesn’t has to be something completely new, it can be something that is amongst us. If one can make it into something that can be more user friendly and more fitting into todays technology who knows it might be the next big thing after messaging. So you got what it takes to make the next big thing?