Facebook is building an app to rival Snapchat just months after it failed in an attempt to buy the photo-sharing service.
The Financial Times reported that Facebook has been working on the app – known internally as Slingshot – for several months.
Mark Zuckerberg’s firm offered $3bn (£1.8bn) for Snapchat late last year, but was turned down.
The Snapchat app allows users to send picture and video messages which self-destruct after a short period of time.
Slingshot is thought to be similar, although primarily focused on video.
Facebook is unbundling its features into various apps
When released, the service is likely to be a standalone app, rather than incorporated into the main Facebook app.
Facebook attempted to take on Snapchat directly in December 2012 with an app called Poke.
However it was not as popular, and was removed from the app store earlier this month.
Earlier this year, Facebook bought messaging service WhatsApp – which boasts 500m users – for $14.6bn (£8.7bn) in cash and stock.
Slingshot is said to resemble TapTalk, a new video-messaging app from Berlin where users tap a profile picture to instantly send a photo or short video, which can be viewed only once by the recipient.
