Facebook could lose 80 percent of users by 2017 says researchers

Researchers at Princeton University has predicted that the most popular social network site, Facebook could see a mass exodus of up to 80% of its users between 2015 and 2017.

The researchers have likened Facebook’s rapid growth to the spread of an infectious disease which spreads to many people and then die out over time.

Image: vr-zone.com

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have successfully described with epidemiological models,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

“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.”

The popular example used was the social network MySpace which was founded in 2003, reached its peak in 2008 with 76 million unique monthly visits in the US before fading into obscurity by 2011.

However, this research should be taken with a pinch of salt because it is only a theory without hard facts to support it. Although Facebook has expressed concerns about reduction in young teen users, it has not shown a big decrease in its overall user base.

The study has also not been peer reviewed and did I say it was conducted by engineers? I guess only time will tell if Facebook will dominate for a long time. It must be noted that Facebook was founded a year after MySpace in 2004.

Realistically, it looks more like Facebook knocked MySpace out rather than people getting fed up of MySpace.

Via Telegraph

Posted in facebook, internet