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Comment by nora4 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades.

One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.

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A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree.

I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).

That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS. With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - and shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I text with.

I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the iOS market share is lower.

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