Facebook is hella scared of Snapchat. And why wouldn’t they be? Snapchat is where all the teens are. To teens, Facebook is that place where 50 year olds hang around and talk about mortgages and divorce. Snapchat, on the other hand, is where cool kids post Snaps with that flower crown filter and sext like mad rabbits.
y’all can say that the flower crown is the ho filter on snapchat if you want, but it clears my skin right tf up, idc idc idc.
— Raven. (@RavenK_) April 21, 2016
The Mark Zuckerberg army has tried their own Snapchat clone in the past. Do you remember it? If course you don’t: it was called Slingshot and did not exist on the App Store for very long. It is presumably only used now by elite hackers sharing government secrets, or something like that.
Facebook also saw the mass appeal of those 3D filters and bought out MSQRD, a startup camera app that does essentially the same thing, but seems to have many more partnerships with big cinema properties and the like.
But they’re getting back on the horse! The Wall Street Journal reports that they’re in the early stages of development of another image messaging app which integrates their somewhat popular Periscope-style livestreaming. It’s early days and may not even come to fruition, but they gotta get those millennials onside somehow, right?
The WSJ makes the very interesting point that users these days are less inclined to download new apps – the reasoning being that after having smartphones for so long, users in 2016 feel like they’ve got what they need. That’ll make it hard for Facebook to break into that kind of market after Snapchat’s freak success.
So there ya go. Another possible sexting app to add to your arsenal, with the added benefit of having your junk uploaded to whatever marketing database Facebook has planned.
Source: The Wall Street Journal.
Photo: Getty Images / David Ramos.
