Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, has been supervising a top-secret project after failing to woe Snapchat’s creators Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy to sell. Facebook knew Snapchat had an edge and wanted to pick up the startup last year for a reported $3 billion. But that number didn’t affect Snapchat as it continued adding features to the app that made people want it more.
Last month, it updated the app (with wild success) to include video chatting and text-based messaging as well, thereby fully deploying its messaging store without losing its core feature – all communication from Snapchat still get deleted after a short period.
Facebook is now working on its own private sharing app called “SlingShot”, which would primarily be a video-based service. But can it dethrone Snapchat, which already has a big user base, longer market exposure and exciting features?
The one area where Facebook can truly capitalize is by going after Snapchat’s weaknesses. One of them is that the app had to pay a large settlement in a lawsuit which alleged messages don’t get destroyed permanently or immediately. Snapchat agreed to the charges and decided to settle with the FTC. Currently it’s credibility is lost and there’s definitely a bit of stink attached to the app at the moment. Facebook has this moment’s window to make their play, by releasing a completely secure, self-destructing chat service.
Facebook’s supposed SlingShot app will upset Snapchat’s growth course, but to what degree is presently unknown. Facebook could do maximum damage by bundling it with its Messenger, rather than releasing it as a standalone app. This added feature would go a long way towards ensuring more engaged users.
Slingshot takes a different approach. It is said to resemble TapTalk, a new video-messaging app from Berlin-based Wit Dot Media released last month, in which users tap or hold a contact’s profile picture to instantly send a photo or short video, which can be viewed only once by the recipient.
Private messaging is a big portion of all smartphone usage. One thing is certain: Facebook will have a enormous user base to tap into with SlingShot and the numbers dwarfs Snapchat’s active user base. So if SlingShot is any good at all, it may be worrying days for Snapchat.
23-year-old CEO, Evan Spiegel in an interview with ‘The Verge’ said that the reason none of his friends video call each other on a daily basis is because “calling” was born of an era where software needed to imitate real-world tools. “What does a phone look like without a ringer?” he asks. He sums up his idea more neatly. “For Snapchat, the closer we can get to ‘I want to talk to you’ — that emotion of wanting to see you and then seeing you — the better and better our product and our view of the world will be.” To Spiegel, the future of communication isn’t about rethinking or upgrading phone calls as Skype, FaceTime, and Hangouts have done. It’s about imagining a future that leaves the phone metaphor behind entirely.
Dropbox is the only online storage solutions to offer clients for Linux and Blackberry, along with the usual Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS standards – even though an official Windows Phone app still remains indefinable. This goes a long way to ensuring that your data can be with you, no matter what kind of technology you want to use. The basic free account provides a with a somewhat small – in contrast to competitor services – 2GB of storage. For documents, this amount works, however if you want to store any kind of media – photos, music, or video – it will fade away very fast. You have an option of investing and upgrading to the 100GB plan. Dropbox also offers 500MB of additional free storage for each friend you get to sign up to the service – with a limit of 16GB.
