Facebook marks its 10th anniversary on February 4, 2014 and, shortly thereafter, dies.
Researchers at New Jersey (USA)-based Princeton University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have predicted what they refer to as imminent demise of Facebook by comparing the growth curve of epidemics to those of online social networks, according to eTurboNews.
Like a bubonic plague, the researchers are quoted as saying, the hugely popular US-based social networking website that reported nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users in October 2013 will gradually die out within the next three years as people are becoming immune to it.
The forecast, eTurboNews says, is based on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The Google Trends service charts indicated that Facebook searches reached its highest point in December 2012 and have since begun to decrease.
“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” the authors said in a paper entitled Epidemiological Modeling of Online Social Network Dynamics.
“Eventually, users begin to leave and recovery spreads infectiously as users begin to lose interest in the social network,” they added.
The study suggests that Facebook, which has spread like an infectious disease, could lose 80% of its users by 2017.
An ArtMatters.Info article.
