FB burning after burning application Slingshot did not meet?

According to a recent article by foreign media, Facebook's hit-and-miss Slingshot application, which hit the store after launching its subscription service, was highly anticipated. It was among the top 50 Free App Rankings in the App Store, but dropped out of the top 1000. Does this mean that the application does not meet Facebook's expectations? It has been revealed that the goal of developing Slingshot's creative lab is to find "suitable audiences" for it instead of finding a large audience for it.

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On June 9, Facebook accidentally went online with the Slingshot app and quickly pulled it out of the Apple App Store. Eight days later, the social network officially launched the app on the iOS and Android platforms, and Slingshot was designed to allow users to share and send automatically deleted photos and videos.

Today, Slingshot has been squeezed out of the App Store app rankings for more than a month.

According to App Annie, a research institute that tracks mobile apps, Slingshot hit the top 50 Free App Rankings in the US App Store one day after launch. However, it later fell out of the top 1000.

On Android, Slingshot app downloads between 100,000 and 500,000 based on Google Play store data.

That's the one-month download rating many startups dream of, but Slingshot is not out of the ordinary startup's application. It came from Facebook, claiming to have more than 1 billion active users, just as other Facebook actions at its inception sparked widespread media attention.

Is that Slingshot a failure? This depends on Facebook's expectations of the application.

Earlier this year, the social network formed a new division called Creative Labs that will be devoted to developing stand-alone applications beyond the flagship Facebook application. In the past, Facebook launched its own applications, such as Messenger and Poke, to promote those apps on its main app. And now, it's experimenting to make the new application grow spontaneously.

According to people familiar with Facebook's ideas, one of the goals of the creative lab is to "reset" the expectations for the size of new, stand-alone users. Instead of looking for a large audience, the department wants to find them "right audiences." In other words, Facebook does not want employees or users to compare Slingshot with older, stand-alone apps like Messenger and Instagram (which have hundreds of millions of active users), and of course they do not want them to be compared to Facebook's main app.

Unlike other Facebook applications, creative labs have a very small application team: it is said that the Slingshot team has only 10 people and Paper has only about 15 people. Both application teams are actively gathering initial user feedback and improving the product accordingly - though this may not be obvious to Slingshot users as it is currently under-updated.

Sources said the Slingshot team was "excited about the initial response to the app and plans to introduce new features and iterations, but there is no specific timetable yet.

You may agree that Facebook's latest stand-alone applications should be measured differently from previous Facebook applications, but that may trigger brand impressions. Nowadays, one of the big questions for Facebook in the industry is whether this social network can also innovate fee-based products.

Paper came to light on the iOS platform in January of this year, winning wide acclaim for its innovative designs. However, the app later fell out of the top 1,000 free application charts - it stayed longer on the list than Slingshot did. This does not change the fact that Paper introduced several innovative features that are likely to be integrated into other Facebook products in the future. But this raises the fundamental question: If Facebook does not introduce a series of new applications to be popular, its brand will be affected?

http://mashable.com/2014/07/19/facebook-slingshot-rankings/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner

Translator: Le Bang

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