Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg isn’t one to take no for an answer, so when his company’s attempts to buy messaging service Snapchat fell on deaf ears last year along with the failure of the Poke app, it was never going to be the end of the story. Now it’s being reported that with Snapchat going from strength to strength without Facebook’s involvement, the social network is hard at work bringing its own video and instant messaging app to the masses.
The new app, reported by the Financial Times to have been in development for months, will be a standalone option rather than being rolled into Facebook’s main app. It’s also likely to be a project under the wing of Facebook’s Creative Labs, which is the same group of people that created the rather interesting Paper app that was all the rage a few months ago. Mark Zuckerberg himself is also believed to be directly linked to the project, which just goes to show how important the Snapchat competitor is believed to be inside the Facebook corridors or power.
Snapchat was the subject of a failed $3billion buyout by Facebook last year, and with instant text and video messages that are remotely deleted after their first viewing, the service has been hugely popular for all kinds of reasons. Facebook’s own version would apparently work in a very similar way, though we would expect a Facebook slant to be in effect. Maybe every other message would be an advertisement for something you’ve no interest in whatsoever.
Facebook is understandably keeping quiet on the leaked news, but that neither confirms nor denies the existence of an app that would no doubt take quite a swipe at Snapchat. With so many Facebook users out there, if you’ve got a need for instantly self-deleting messages, why create a new account to send them? That being said, with Facebook’s somewhat sketchy history with privacy, and the failure of a somewhat similar Facebook’s very own Poke app, would you really trust Zuck to keep their end of that particular bargain?
We’re not sure we would.
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