Chennai: The most touted social networking site ‘Facebook’ may get deprived of 80 percent of its active users by 2017, says researchers from Princeton University. Researches explain the epidemic trend that has been displayed by users with reference to case study conducted on Myspace which had a similar fate.,
The study was conducted by John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from Princeton University’s mechanical and aerospace engineering department based on the count of Google searches with ‘Facebook’ as the keyword. Researchers published their finding entitled Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics in which they said “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,” as reported in The Guardian.
Cannarella and Spechler compare the sudden upsurge and gradual decline of the love towards social media with that of epidemics that display the same character. “Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” says the report.
A comparative study with MySpace reveals the fact that the venture founded in 2003 reached its epitome in 2007 before surrendering in 2011. With Facebook turning 10 years as on 4th February the estimated user base of the social networking giant is 1.2 billion as on October 2013. They tested various equations against the lifespan of Myspace, before applying them to Facebook.
Myspace was founded in 2003 and reached its peak in 2007 with 300 million registered users, before falling out of use by 2011.
Purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580m, Myspace signed a $900m deal with Google in 2006 to sell its advertising space and was at one point valued at $12bn. It was eventually sold by News Corp for just $35m.
The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could explain the drop in Google searches – those looking to log on are no longer doing so by typing the word Facebook into Google.
Decline in the number of Google searches of the word Facebook can be justified as the more are more users use smart gadgets to log in where Google search is not a requisite. However the statement made by David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer provides a crystal clear picture to the dwindling popularity of Facebook. “We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens.”
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