Facebook To Announce Snapchat Competitor?

Facebook had always had its eyes on Snapchat and when the deal to acquire it went sore, looks like they started to work on their own version of Snapchat.

Slingshot, well this is not the official name, but the name internally called by Facebook is almost ready to hit the appstore later this month.

Slingshot seems to just be a copy of Snapchat, that will help user share photos that will disappear in set number of hours. Snapchat is known to be very popular among teens who wants to shares every intimate photos with their friends.

This is Facebook’s second attempt against Snapchat, in December 2012 Facebook launched Poke an app very similar to Snapchat that allows to send short messages,  photos and videos that are automatically deleted after one viewing. Sadly, Poke never really took-off and Facebook killed in last week.

The people familiar with the plans for Slingshot claim that the app has been in development for months, and that it is a much more serious attempt to snag some users away from Snapchat than Poke ever was (Poke was reportedly created and launched in less than a day).

In this arena, Facebook’s working from an “if ya can’t buy em, beat em” strategy. Reports indicated that Facebook attempted to acquire Snapchat for about $3 billion late last year, but were turned down. Facebook no doubt sees Snapchat as a major competitor–and they should. Snapchat pushes the biggest volume of messages, by volume, in the country right now.

This news comes just months after Facebook’s acquisition of another top messaging competitor, WhatsApp.