Back in 2008-2010, FB conquered instant messaging [1]. Since then, other services proliferated, including WhatsApp (which they wisely bought), and others, but FB Chat, rebranded as Messenger, is still a hugely important platform.
Instagram is growing among the demographic that Facebook first conquered when it first came out and is vying [2][3] for Snapchat (partially by its original premise, partially by copying its features [4]) to be the most popular platform for 18-25.
Meanwhile the original Facebook's audience is aging, and most of the time it's an event scheduler (like Google Calendar), or photo album store (like Flickr), or a tumble-log of memes (like Tumblr), but lots of people still run the app on their phones and wander around with Location enabled. On desktops, a ton of people don't clear their cookies and the Like widget on websites lets Facebook know what sites they visit. Some people have taken to using Facebook Auth to log in to medium-value sites they visit less often -- like to buy concert tickets.
All this contributes enormous value to Facebook's ad ecosystem, which is in second place to Google, and together those two are the only real players [5].
Instagram is growing among the demographic that Facebook first conquered when it first came out and is vying [2][3] for Snapchat (partially by its original premise, partially by copying its features [4]) to be the most popular platform for 18-25.
Meanwhile the original Facebook's audience is aging, and most of the time it's an event scheduler (like Google Calendar), or photo album store (like Flickr), or a tumble-log of memes (like Tumblr), but lots of people still run the app on their phones and wander around with Location enabled. On desktops, a ton of people don't clear their cookies and the Like widget on websites lets Facebook know what sites they visit. Some people have taken to using Facebook Auth to log in to medium-value sites they visit less often -- like to buy concert tickets.
All this contributes enormous value to Facebook's ad ecosystem, which is in second place to Google, and together those two are the only real players [5].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107321#11114518 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800418 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12799794#12800957 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12210324 [5] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/814842452003659776