Researchers at Princeton University said Facebook will be largely abandoned by 2017, losing about 80% of its current users. The researchers compared the growth curve of epidemics to those of online social networks.
According to the scientists, like bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually die out.
Facebook clocks 10 on February 14 and has survived Myspace and Bebo. The researchers however said the platform would lose 80% of its peak user base within the next three years.
John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the university’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.
“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” they wrote in a paper entitled Epidemiological Modelling of Online Social Network Dynamics.
“Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of ‘immunity’ to the idea.”
