&quot;de facto platform, it’s hard to control and even harder to dislodge&quot;<p>There is a Finnish service called irc-galleria.net. It&#x27;s a service that was created to let irc users to share pictures of themselves to other irc users. It got really big in Finland. They even had big screen in center of Helsinki to show new pictures uploaded to the service. They had this paid feature which let you keep a list of friends in there. Everybody talked about irc-galleria stalking.<p>Then Facebook came. The major difference was that facebook let you make friends for free. Year later nobody remembers irc-galleria.<p>Dislodging a platform is easier than ever. It&#x27;s enough to make better or cheaper product, then just get lucky. Previously you had to also take distribution and marketing into account and then get lucky.