Facebook’s Slingshot Launches to Take On Snapchat

The most recent newcomer to the self-destructing messages game is Slingshot, birthed from a hackathon and nursed to life by a small crew at Facebook Creative Labs.

The app will feel familiar to anyone who’s used messaging app like Instagram, Vine and Snapchat to share short movies and photos that can be altered with scribbles and doodles.

Photos and videos shared via Slingshot self destruct a la Snapchat, but the main wrinkle where Slingshot is concerned is that if you share something with someone, they can’t see it until they share something back with you. Whatever you send them looks like a blocky mess until they return the favor. We’ll see how long it takes for that to get annoying: I’m imagining petabytes of shots of people’s feet being sent back just so they can see whatever’s been sent to them.

The app will be available today for iOS and Android. The links haven’t quite gone live as of the time this post got published, but you’ll be able to visit sling.me/download once everything’s ready.

Here’s a quick video that shows off the app:

[TNW]