It's great that young people are diversifying in this way, but isn't it a little apples to oranges? You don't use Facebook to send disappearing images to each other, you don't use Instagram to plan events or remind you of birthdays, and you don't use Snapchat to share pictures of your cat with followers around the world. They're very different things, yet they are all lumped into the category "social network" because you can make connections with people. By that standard, practically any online service or platform these days is a social network!
Still, it's very significant that Facebook is not the go-to thing for lots of online connective tasks (even if they do own Instagram). People don't want all their interactions to be on one platform for the same reason no one puts all their eggs in the same basket, and in addition, there are nicer baskets out there to try out!
Absolutely. It is a complete misunderstanding if they're considering services like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as somehow mutually exclusive.
You can only really compare Facebook with services like Google+, Myspace, and Orkut; and even then, many people have active accounts on multiple of those services.
Isn't that how it starts though? It is no longer possible to disrupt Facebook on its terms. You have to offer something completely different at first then slowly add Facebooks key features to provide a smooth transition.
"Innovator's Dilemma" describes a similar process. An underdog comes along, creates an inferior product or a product addressing slightly different needs, and then slowly but surely builds up its feature set to address the big dog's other customers.
"By that standard, practically any online service or platform these days is a social network!" Yes, but to me, this is the correct standard anyway. Two reasons: a) My time is limited: Anytime I spend on something like Medium is time away from Facebook. They are all competing for that limited time I have for being involved in a social network. and b) All these services generally also mean a different set of friends for the me. There is some overlap but almost all my social networks have a different group of followers/recommenders etc. The more time I invest in building one set of friends, the less I do in another - and this is a sticky investment, one that can easily prove make or break for any social network.
Not really. Twitter is just as good for identity as Facebook, if not more so, since they can more easily verify identity with mobile accounts, which is how most people access twitter.
On top of that, they have a lot of engineers working on how to parse messages with slang and code. So even though there is not purpose-built UIs for events and picture sharing, Twitter and Facebook both solve the same need for 3rd parties.
Still, it's very significant that Facebook is not the go-to thing for lots of online connective tasks (even if they do own Instagram). People don't want all their interactions to be on one platform for the same reason no one puts all their eggs in the same basket, and in addition, there are nicer baskets out there to try out!