Facebook has been trying to capture some of Snapchat's magic for a while now. While Facebook has been losing its appeal with young, active teens (an incredibly important demographic) over the past few years, Snapchat has caught fire with the same crowd. Now, in its third attempt at regaining that audience, Facebook has released "Slingshot," a Snapchat clone with a twist, which will either be the app's forte, or its fatal flaw.

Slingshot: A LOT Like Snapchat

Slingshot is technically Facebook's third attempt at a Snapchat app after its failed and subsequently culled Poke app and its subsequent, and similarly unsuccessful, attempt to acquire the real-deal Snapchat company for close to $3 billion.

So maybe the third time's the charm for Facebook, which released its Slingshot ephemeral messaging app for iOS and Android a week ago.

A lot of the prerequisites for Slingshot's success are in place: It's a Facebook app, so users can instantly add their friends to the app's contact list; it works almost identically like Snapchat; and it's got a trick in its rulebook to increase user engagement. But whether it'll succeed remains to be seen.

After logging in and adding Facebook friends if you want to, Slingshot's picture/video capture, editing and message sending is basically just like Snapchat. You can capture a video by holding down the capture button, or just press it for a snapshot, after which you can draw and annotate your multimedia message and quickly "sling" it out to one or more friends. And the messages will self-destruct, just like Snapchat.

Slingshot's Quirky Difference: Genius or Ham-handed?

The only major difference with Slingshot is on the receiving end of a message.

The app has been programmed to enforce user participation, in what Facebook is a very clever move. According to Slingshot's introductory blog post and introductory screen video in the app, you can send an infinite amount of messages to any number of friends. But there's a catch: "Here's the deal: Friends won't be able to see your shot until they sling something back to you," the Slingshot crew writes. "They can reply with a reaction -- or simply swipe your shot away."

If you don't send your own Slingshot message back to the sender, your message will remain pixelated on the screen, only giving the slightest teasing hint of what's behind the blur.

Slingshot: Coercing Participation, Negating Conversational Logic

There's a commonly held rule of Internet culture, often called the "10 percent" or "1 percent" rule. Basically, 90 percent of Internet users passively view content, 9 percent edit, discover, or curate content, and only 1 percent actually create new content. Facebook wants to turn up the number of creators by upending that rule and forcing the 90 percent users to sling a new message in order to view the one sent to them.

This sounds like a great idea to increase user participation and encourage conversations, but there's a big problem. In order to force "replies" from recipients of Slingshot messages, Facebook is upending more than the 90 percent rule -- the company is upending the logic of message-mediated conversation.

Ever since written letters were carried on horseback, nonverbal conversations have followed a simple pattern. Send the original message to the recipient; the recipient reads the message and replies back to the sender, reacting to the content in the message; the original sender reads the reply and... repeat ad infinitum.

Because Facebook can't force users to reply after they've seen the message -- unless Slingshot did something really invasive, like automatically take and send a selfie while recipients are viewing the message -- Slingshot instead asks users to reply before they've seen the message.

So when the Slingshot crew writes, "They can reply with a reaction," it makes no sense. You can't genuinely react to a pixel-blurred message because you don't know what you're replying to.

It's not impossible that Slingshot takes off in popularity, but it seems unlikely. One could see spammy throwaway pre-replies, made up of pictures of nothing (just so recipients can actually see the first message), becoming a common frustration among the active one percenters. And that will probably lead to those valued users to deleting the app and going back to Snapchat.

Tap That App?

If you're already on Snapchat, probably not. Stick to the original because it's still the best. If you're a Facebook user who doesn't know many people on Snapchat and are looking for something a little more fun, give it a try. But if you want the real deal, you know what ephemeral messaging app to use.

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