Facebook Slingshot

» see slingshot.facebook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in june 2014 i was 30 in ankara, on whatsapp through a daily-driver android. slingshot was facebook's second swing at a category i did not run on my phone. mark zuckerberg had tried to buy snapchat for $3 billion in late 2013 and got told no. slingshot was what came after that no.

the app launched june 17 2014 out of facebook creative labs, the menlo park experiment lab where paul adams and a small team of product leads ran fast-burning standalone apps that lived outside the main facebook stack. joey flynn designed the interface. the hook was reciprocity. a sling sat locked on your screen until you sent your own photo or video back. you could not consume without producing. that was the entire pitch.

for whatever reason, the lock-to-reply mechanic read as a workaround for the fact that snapchat already had the network. snapchat had built its base out of the high-school after-school window 2011 through 2013, the kind of momentum a 2014 launch from facebook could not buy back. slingshot's daily active number never broke out of the experiment-app range. snapchat hit 200 million monthly actives by 2016 while slingshot was already pulled from stores.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

but yeah, the launch press in june 2014 read well. techcrunch wrote up the reply-to-unlock mechanic as a real product idea. engadget gave it polite copy. close enough. the app was free and it shipped on android and ios on the same day. you did not even need a facebook account to sign up, which was the load-bearing detail. creative labs wanted the standalone-app pretense even when the underlying identity layer was still facebook's phone-number graph.

for whatever reason, the in-app camera was passable for 2014 and you could doodle on a photo. the social loop was point-to-point only with no story feed. that fit the early-snapchat behavior pattern, the one snapchat itself had already moved on from with stories shipping in late 2013. so slingshot launched against the snapchat of 18 months earlier.

~ the slide ~

this part you had to be in the us for, and i was not. the cracks were the usual ones for a network app shipped after the network had already formed somewhere else. the people you wanted to sling to were on snapchat. they had snap streaks going. they were not going to install a second photo messenger to please facebook. by mid-2015 slingshot's app store rank was below 1000 in the social category on both stores.

either way, facebook's executive math on standalone apps shifted that same year. wall street kept asking what creative labs was actually doing. messenger had been spun out of the main app in 2014 and was clearly working. whatsapp had been acquired in early 2014 and was clearly working. the four creative labs apps were not. paper looked beautiful and had no growth loop. rooms was an anonymous-handle revival of an older internet that facebook itself had killed. riff was collaborative video before the format had an audience. slingshot was the snapchat answer that did not land.

~ the long tail ~

on december 7 2015 facebook pulled slingshot from the app store and the google play store on the same day. close enough. rooms and riff came down the same day. paper had already shut down in july 2015. the creative labs division was dissolved with the december pull (or whatever it was called). four apps in 22 months and zero of them survived. the team had built standalone apps the way startups did, the parent company had inherited none of the discipline that makes a standalone app actually grow.

the snapchat answer eventually came inside the main app. instagram stories shipped in august 2016 and absorbed the snapchat usage curve directly. facebook's bet had been right about the format and wrong about where to ship it. snapchat went public in march 2017 and lost half its value within a year as instagram pulled the format facebook had failed to clone with a standalone in 2014. slingshot is the small grave under that larger arc.

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