Facebook and Instagram working on Bolt, yet another Snapchat-competitor?

After a failed attempt at acquiring Snapchat and then building a Snapchat-inspired app, Facebook is now looking at Instagram's popularity to attract users to a similar feature. A notification introducing Instagram users to a new photo sharing feature called Bolt has started appearing for several users. The company introduces Bolt as a 'one tap photo messaging service.  It is highly speculated to be a Snapchat-inspired feature, considering the social network has lately launched Slingshot. "With Facebook's Slingshot already offering ephemeral photo and video messages, Bolt seems like a duplication of efforts. Of course, there's always the chance that Bolt will offer some truly unique twist on the format and shove pretenders to the media messaging crown aside," states Engadget. Some believe that Slingshot is already a failure, so it could be Facebook's yet-another attempt, by taking advantage of the Instagram app.  "Facebook came up with the godawful Slingshot app, which I’m sure even Facebook employees aren’t using at this point, leave alone the average users. But Facebook has an ace up its sleeve in the form of Instagram, and so now they are using Instagram’s popularity to take on Snapchat," states GSMArena.  The company hasn't officially announced the feature, and no details are available yet. However, several people who have received the notification/banner have started taking screenshots and sharing on the social site. For instance, take a look at the tweet below:

Did anyone else get this weird bolt notification on their Instagram earlier? pic.twitter.com/SBrLH7qTTK — areli i (@yo_areli) July 24, 2014

 Singing a similar tune, Techcrunch writes, "The current assumption that Bolt is an Instagram creation makes sense, given that taking on Snapchat has clearly been a big focus for Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, which also recently launched a picture messaging client called Slingshot." However, it quickly points out, "Instagram might have been trying out the app install format with a fictional app to see if it was something users would click on." Facebook and Instagram have been tight lipped since the notification was rolled out, but we can expect some activity in this front soon.