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Comment by softdev12 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that messaging is a hugely important aspect for the future of Facebook, but I wouldn't say that FB's entire future is dependent on messaging. The article's title, with its use of "entrusted its future" seems to imply more than what's really at stake.

I would argue that virtual reality (with Oculus) or even the core social network base product is more important to facebook's future than messaging. Sure messaging is important, but it's becoming more and more of a commodity.

At the end of the day, I think facebook has currently entrusted its future to Zuckerberg and not the CEO of PayPal.

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The younger generation isn't bothering with Facebook as much (today's teens to early 20s) and going right to services that offer messaging and image sharing, maybe that's what the article is referring to.

Where are you getting these stats from? Would love to see sources.

You mean like WhatsApp?

Yes. The 13-year-olds are all over that shit, it's mind boggling. I became aware of this recently when I found out my niece's class has a WhatsApp group and it's their shared space, like a permanent party in there. After seeing that, I realized FB in comparison seems static, linear and (blasphemy) positively clean and well organized.

As a 30+ i find it funny that chat rooms are making a come back. I used IRC (and still use) back in the day, and the funky flash and java chat rooms that a lot of mainstream websites used to host to build their communities.

WhatsApp always appealed more than Facebook because it is much more like a chat room.

What goes around comes around as they say.

It also highlights just how terribly Microsoft fumbled with MSN Messenger. They had hundreds of millions of active users and just sort of pissed it all away. MS could have launched a social network just with Messenger to generate the graph and whatnot. They sorta did something, but it was a confusing experience IIRC. Then after they lose their users to Skype, they buy Skype and repeat the process, it seems. (The Skype client hasn't gotten much better and I've not seen anything interesting come out of the purchase.)

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