
Introducing Slingshot: A Creative Labs App  - intull
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/introducing-slingshot-a-creative-labs-app/
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alaskamiller
Old is remembering it as sound blaster, young is remembering it as facebook.

So begins the gap.

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cauterize
Care to explain what you mean by "sound blaster"?

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darrelld
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster)

It's a family of sound cards from the Win 9X era.

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dragonwriter
> It's a family of sound cards from the Win 9X era.

As the Wikipedia article you cite notes, SB isn't _from_ the Win 9X era, it
was a de facto standard _prior to_ the Win 9X (i.e., late DOS era.)

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0x0
What's the point of withholding from non-US appstores?

Isn't it MORE WORK to selectively publish to specific appstores instead of
just leaving the "all countries" checkbox checked in iTunesConnect?

So tired of announcement after announcement from fb just leading to blank
pages on my devices.

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k-mcgrady
Agreed. Paper is still US only too. With Paper I can understand it a bit more
(work out the bugs) but this is a social app. The more people who have access
the more successful it will be especially considering you needs friends using
it to able to use it.

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0x0
For Paper I actually bothered to sign out of my non-US account, in to my US-
account, download it, sign out of my US-account, sign in to my non-US account
to check it out. Hope their servers are happy serving old clients for a long
while because I certainly can't be bothered to perform that dance every time
they have an upgrade.

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k-mcgrady
I did the same. Paper is excellent. Problem with this app is none of my non-US
friends will do it. So even though I can download it - I can't use it.

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Sommer717
The premise seems really intriguing, essentially Snapchat with an incentive to
keep the interaction going. But Facebook seems to be deliberately hindering
their own viral growth, because I can't download the app:
[http://i.imgur.com/UAlGmV9.png](http://i.imgur.com/UAlGmV9.png) \- presumably
Europe doesn't matter?

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bronzewolf
I think I've crashed in the iOS version of the app no less than 15 times in
the brief time I've been playing with it. The app is pretty, but all the
pretty in the world doesn't matter if it's not functional.

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ceejayoz
Mine's worked fine thus far. What iOS version are you on?

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bronzewolf
iOS 7, on an iPhone 4s.

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ceejayoz
Ah, that may explain it. I'm pretty sure no one at Facebook is testing on a
4-series these days, if performance of the main app is anything to go by.

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bronzewolf
I highly doubt that's true. They'd be missing 50% of the iPhone market if so.

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gkoberger
Interesting that they released this, having just shuttered their very similar
app Poke 2 months ago.

The big difference? Slingshot doesn't use the Facebook branding. That's very
telling.

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k-mcgrady
Plus poke is a 'brand' as old as Facebook and nobody really knows what it
means. They took a word nobody understood and threw it on a new, totally
different product.

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wideroots
Very interesting idea to make people contribute more contents...but I'm not
too sure how this would change or contribute to the existing paradigm of
mobile conversations.

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uptown
I don't blame apps or app-makers for people's choices and actions, but this
seems like the perfect app to cause texting while driving even if the
recipient had no intention of doing-so. Requiring a "recipient" to send a
message in order to receive a pending message sounds like it'd be more-likely
to create that scenario.

