Slingshot 2.1

Facebook has been known to pop out various mobile tools that have various degrees of success. Slingshot is one of these apps that the team has created just for the fun of it, but also as a jibe towards services such as Snapshot. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg’s team, however, Slingshot hasn’t been that successful in either of its forms.

If you’ll remember, the original Slingshot was vastly different than the second version which was launched a few months back. But since we can’t exactly play with the original Slingshot, we’re going to have a go at the current version.

Test your limits

To start things off, it’s pretty obvious why this isn’t a successful app – it’s incredibly annoying to use. Sure, the interface is pretty clean and you can easily figure out that you have to swipe over the screen to move between “Shots,” “Reactions,” and “People.” That doesn’t make it any easier to handle for first time users.

What you can do with this tool is take shots of whatever you feel like, both pictures and looping videos. All this content has a 24 hour life span (or until you swipe it away).

As you launch the app, you’ll have to use your Facebook account to log in. Then, you’ll get to follow a bunch of random people before going and looking for your actual buddies.

There are two options to share content. One lets you share photos and videos to all your followers, making that content visible for a certain period of time. The other version of events has you reacting to someone’s shot, which is done with another image or video. That makes the reaction shots only visible to the person you’re sending them to.

Minimal editing

Slingshot allows you to pick one of a handful of filters (which you get to after swiping left and right over the taken shot). It’s also possible to add handwritten notes or doodles on the image, or typed text.

The settings area enables you to change the user name and a feature that adds more privacy to your account by allowing you to approve all followers before they get to actually see any content you post. All shots can be saved to the phone by enabling yet another feature.

All in all, this is a rather silly app that won’t have a very long lifespan compared to other Facebook-born apps.

Portable version:

• Slingshot for Android