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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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brightball·

In the US the “super app” was probably AOL.

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Facebook is effectively a "super app" already.

* Friends' posts

* News

* Pages (manage your business and engage with customers)

* Discussion

* Marketplace -- huge for some people

* Groups -- huge for some people

* Probably other functionality I've no idea about

(Of course, I happen to think it does a terrible job of its original purpose, which is friends' posts, but clearly lots of users use it anyway...)

It's not even close to these super apps outside the states. You can renew your drivers license in WeChat.

IIRC You can sue someone in civil court, get through the whole process, get a sentence and get paid compensation when you win, all in WeChat

Sounds kinda nice when you put it like that.

Read such an example from early in the COVID-19 pandemic, where a gym tried to bill someone despite rules that such bills had to be suspended during lockdown or something similar.

I think the whole affair with court claim etc. was done over WeChat, I do not recall anything outside of it.

There’s no technical blocker about why this couldn’t be done in Facebook.

Ultimately it’s a governance issue, about how much American/European citizens are comfortable funnelling processes like drivers licenses (or even court cases) through a private entity like Facebook.

It's not 2010 anymore. How many people in the USA are both under 40 and using Facebook?

And of those people, who left is using it as more than a glorified event calendar?

Quite a lot, seems like:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribu...

...that data appears to be claiming that more 25-34yos in the United States use Facebook than actually exist.

And perhaps Compuserve for the UK and Europe. Ah, makes me feel nostalgic, I loved Compuserve!

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