Furthermore, from what my friends who use Facebook and Google+ tell me, the feature they use the most is the chat&#x2F;instant messaging, not the rest of the &quot;social&quot; stuff.<p>So if you don&#x27;t even have a messaging platform, it&#x27;ll be even harder to compete with networks that have already been established and have significant adoption.<p>Also, for what it&#x27;s worth, I think that in order to really compete with the other networks, in addition to a messaging platform, you&#x27;re also going to need mobile (iOS and Android) clients for your network so that users can engage while on the go.<p>Edit:<p>So you&#x27;re going to need all of this to achieve basic feature parity with established networks, forgetting advanced features like Google Photos, and then you&#x27;re going to reach the hardest part - convincing users to switch from the network that all their contacts are on to a brand new one.