Facebook Slingshot

Ellis Hamburger, writing for The Verge:

At first, Facebook’s new ephemeral messaging app, Slingshot, feels like yet another Snapchat clone. The free app, available now for iPhone and Android, lets you take a quick photo or video, mark it up with some colorful drawings, caption it with big white text, and then fire it off to a bunch of friends. But then you receive your first message, and you realize this is something completely different.

In Snapchat or any other messaging app, you can view a message as soon as you receive it. But in Slingshot, you can’t view an incoming “shot” until you send a shot back to the sender. “It’s not just about telling your story, it’s about asking others for their story,” says Slingshot designer Joey Flynn. In other words, Slingshot makes you trade a photo of what you’re doing before you can “unlock” the picture of whatever your friend is up to. Huh?

If they give you phones in hell, this is the sort of app that’s on them.

★ Wednesday, 18 June 2014