Don't they just have to look out for popular social media apps with large userbases? It's surely not rocket science.
The complicated bit is heading off anti-trust regulators.
Re:Facebook Makes Moves on Instagram Users
by skinnymuch on Friday July 13, 2018 @03:25PM
(#17525915)
There’s lot of popular social media apps now or from before. Most don’t succeed the way Instagram and Whatsapp have. So it’s not as simple as just picking any. Yahoo picked up Tumblr, look how that turned out. Look how Snapchat is doing right now money-wise. Though of course that’s tougher to say since Instagram had a direct effect on hurting Snapchat.
Re:Facebook Makes Moves on Instagram Users
by stevenwoo on Friday July 13, 2018 @07:42PM
(#17527743)
Did anything get better after acquisition by Yahoo pre-Oath? I'm actually fine with trying different things and failing, but my spotty memory is Yahoo batted 0.000, Flickr surviving Yahoo by being acquired by smugmug seems like a moral victory more than anything as a fan of Flickr.
Facebook knows the lifecycle of social media networks, and knows that the way to stay in front of the inevitable decay is to watch like a hawk for the New Thing and either buy it (Instagram, WhatsApp) or clone it and stomp it with network effects (Snapchat).