Facebook Releases Slingshot for Self-Destructing Selfies

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Facebook's new Slingshot app aims to create a sense of community by encouraging users to send a photo or video to a group of friends.Credit Facebook

When Facebook ended negotiations to buy Snapchat last year, that did not mean the company stopped thinking about the disappearing photo messages that have made Snapchat so popular for casual conversations, especially among younger users.

Now Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is rolling out Slingshot, its own service for sending self-destructing selfies to friends.

The new app, which will be available in the Apple and Android mobile app stores on Tuesday in the United States and later in other countries, aims to create a sense of community by encouraging users to send a photo or video to a group of friends. Its unique twist is that the recipients are required to share a visual moment of their own before they can see what was sent to them.

The forced reciprocity will certainly put off some potential users. But Slingshot’s creators wanted to make sure that everyone who used the app was an active participant, not just a spectator. “It’s a way of saying: ‘You’re my friends. I want to know what you’re doing,’ ” said Joey Flynn, the app’s product designer, in an interview.

The app is otherwise quite simple to use. You take a photo or shoot video with your smartphone camera and have the chance to add a message or draw on the image, adding an imaginary hat, perhaps, or funny ears. Then you check the other Slingshot users you want to send it to and “sling” it into the ether.

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On Slingshot, a user takes a photo or shoots video with a smartphone camera, and then can add a message or draw on the image, adding, say, stars or a moon.Credit Facebook

That act unlocks any images sent to you by those people that you have not yet seen. You can flip through them and even send a quick response on a split screen. However, once you have flicked away from the image or video, it’s gone. (The person who shot the photo can save it on the phone’s camera roll. And as with Snapchat, savvy recipients can use their phones’ screenshot features to save the file. But the intention is to make it disappear.)

“The moments shared on Slingshot are very spontaneous,” said Will Ruben, the product manager who led the 10-member team. “Because the photos don’t stick around for long, there’s way less pressure to create something awesome.”

Like Paper, an alternative interface for Facebook that focuses more on presenting articles, Slingshot is a product of the company’s Creative Labs initiative. The labs are essentially an incubator for new apps and ideas that might or might not be closely related to the core Facebook service.

Slingshot emerged from a three-day hackathon held last December to generate ideas for Creative Labs to pursue.

Mr. Flynn, who said he thought up Slingshot as a way to push his brothers to respond to his photo messages, teamed up with Rocky Smith, another Facebook engineer, to create a quick Android prototype. They posted it to a group of Facebook employees, and by Christmas, people were using it to share what they were doing over the holidays.

That helped them recruit more people to the team, and after six months of refining, they are ready to share Slingshot with the world.

But does the world — or even Facebook — need another messaging app? Slingshot’s creators are trying to play down expectations, arguing that it is really more of a feed app, like Facebook or Twitter, than a standard messaging service.

Facebook already has Messenger, which can be used to send images to groups of people, and the company in the process of buying WhatsApp, another hugely popular messaging service. It also owns Instagram, a popular photo and video sharing service that recently rolled out new tools to allow users to buff their photos into things that are lasting and beautiful.

Facebook’s previous Snapchat competitor, Poke, never caught on and was quietly killed this year.

“We want to take this slowly,” Mr. Ruben said. No Facebook account is required to use the service — its users connect with other users via their cellphone numbers. And Facebook said it did not plan to promote Slingshot on its main service, at least initially. So it will succeed or fail by word of mouth and app-store reviews.

“We’re just superpumped to get user feedback,” Mr. Smith said.