I think it's worth noting that Twitter essentially lost to Facebook. Facebook's dominance pigeonholed and limited what Twitter could evolve to. And I'm not sure there's room for more than a couple social networks.

I don't see who SnapChat will lose to besides themselves (i.e. monetization). IMO Facebook/Instagram isn't well positioned win today's 13-25 demographic.

The point is, someone will win. And right now I'm not sure who else is in the running.

I see Facebook as the email of this generation. It's not exciting, it doesn't change a whole lot, and virtually everybody has it. I think we're just seeing a lot of novelty, flash in the pan apps coming and going while Facebook maintains it's boring yet stable position.

Facebook is a better messaging platform than SMS, for me, because I have friends spread across the globe that I can contact with a simple internet connection.

I sometimes feel like nobody uses Google Hangouts anymore, which also integrates with SMS so you don't have to bother with multiple applications.

But they don't bundle SMS and 'HoIP' any more, and aren't they killing it in favour of Duo & Allo? But with ~~poor~~ no marketing, and no web UI...

You can use Hangouts for SMS and 'HoIP' still, but they made it a lot more difficult. I'm really not the target demographic for messaging applications, but I am baffled by how Google has handled Hangouts (which seemed to be incredibly popular and worked better 10 years ago - I'm avoiding the name changes over the years because I was able to use the same account continuously), Allo and Duo (I have never tried either and don't understand what they are trying to do).

It honestly feels like Google is actively trying to sabotage themselves for messaging. I just don't get it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and blame google plus, wonder how much long term damage that did. Put off tons of people (aka me) from even trying these services during the time that they should have been gaining traction, and left everything in disarray as they tied, and then tried to untie, all of their services together.

I think duo is the right idea, where making a video call should be just as easy as making a phone call, but so far every time I've tried to use has been met with "install what? can't we just facetime?"

Internally, how do Googlers feel about its messaging "strategy"? I've heard the explanation that Google encourages the schizophrenia with the "launch a product to build your promo packet" philosophy, but that doesn't seem to cause issues in other product lines. But the strategy also certainly can't be intentional, since Google's squandered an obvious chance at dominating the messaging space and is teetering on irrelevancy there.

> You can use Hangouts for SMS and 'HoIP' still, but they made it a lot more difficult.

Yes, it's exactly that 'more difficult' I mean by 'you can't bundle them any more'. SMS and 'HoIP' with the same contact used to appear in the same conversation, but they removed the feature - disabling it for those with it enabled a priori, and disabling others from enabling it.

Well, I never "Hangouts" message someone, but I use hangouts as my daily SMS app, because texts come in through my google voice number.

So does the FB Messenger app (Android at least) as of a few months ago.

Depending on your definition of social media, and if we count Asia, Weibo, Wechat, and Line are major contenders.

You can add Snow to that list. From what I gather it's basically a Snapchat clone by the same company that owns Line. I've noticed my Korean friends here in LA use it all the time to communicate with friends in S. Korea.