Facebook Working On New App

DAVID MURPHY from PCMag writes that Facebook might have killed off its Poke app for iOS, but that doesn't mean it's done trying to beat rival Snapchat at its own messaging game.

For those who never themselves poked, the iOS app allowed a person to send a message, photo, or video to a Facebook friend. Only, doing so came with a time limit — a ten-second countdown before said message disappeared into the digital ether forever.

If that sounds like a pretty basic clone of Snapchat's core services, you'd be correct. It's unclear just how many people ended up using Facebook Poke, but it didn't last that long on the App Store's top-25 list. Snapchat, in comparison, claims that its users send over 700 million different pieces of content each day.

Facebook officially pulled the app from the App Store earlier this month, but that doesn't mean that it's done with its adventures in timed-deletion messaging. A new report from the Financial Times indicates that Facebook has been working on a video messaging app called "Slingshot" for a number of months. The app appears to do for videos what Snapchat has done for pictures… and videos too, of course.

Slingshot, which may or may not see the light of day (but if it does, might even launch as early as this month), mainly allows people to create simple video messages that they toss back and forth. The sending process allegedly mimics that of TapTalk: You're given a grid of images representing your friends (undoubtedly their Facebook profile photos), and you tap their pictures to shoot them a quick image. Tap and hold, and you'll get to record a short video that only they can watch.

Presumably, said message disappears after a set amount of time, but the Financial Times' source didn't address that part in any detail. It's also unclear whether Facebook's app "borrows" some of the other useful features that TapTalk brings to quick messaging: Prohibiting users from retrieving photos or videos they've sent out using the app, in addition to forcing users to take their pictures and videos in real time — no sending of simple gallery images is allowed.

Either way, Facebook has a bit of a ways to go to catch up to Snapchat's early lead in both popularity and features. Snapchat just unveiled text messaging for its app earlier this month, in addition to one-way and two-way video chatting. And it's not as if other, large Web entities are ignoring the self-destructing messaging space either; Yahoo just purchased the Snapchat-like Blink app earlier this month as well.