At the peak of IM I personally had at least 5 IM clients running simultaneously (or, when I became savvy enough, a single client that unified them all), so I de

At the peak of IM I personally had at least 5 IM clients running simultaneously (or, when I became savvy enough, a single client that unified them all), so I definitely hear you. I think two critical differences between the manner IM was used historically and social networks are used now is the (mainly) 1-to-1 nature of chat content (as opposed to mainly 1-to-N nature of social network content) and the usage of persistent state. Without any actual data, my intuition is that the main use case of chat for most people is ephemeral, mostly-synchronous 1-to-1 communication. I only rarely went back through chat history, usually to find some obscure link or something. And because most people's main use of chat is 1-on-1 communication, there is no need to curate persisted content for external viewing. A key component of Facebook is curated and formatted personal content that their connections can asynchronously view. Most people do not want to maintain duplicate photo albums on several platforms, post the same thoughts or essays or rants on multiple platforms, etc.