For a company to replace Facebook (or even scale to a point where they&#x27;re a legitimate competitor) they would have to turn down offers from Facebook&#x2F;MSFT&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;etc to buy them. If Facebook buys then they just stop being a competitor and become part of Facebook. If anyone else buys then they&#x27;re unlikely to want to go up against Facebook consider Facebook&#x27;s marketing power. That alone makes it highly unlikely.<p>There is one the notable exception though -  a startup that got enough traction to worry Facebook and then sold to <i>Google</i> might actually come out on top. Google actively wants to compete with Facebook. The problem for such a startup would be Google&#x27;s track record in social, so they&#x27;d need to resist Google&#x27;s desire to assimilate them too much. That would (probably) be quite hard.