Agencies
NEW YORK: Just like MySpace which peaked in 2008 and then started fading, Facebook too will meet the same fate.
This was predicted in 2014 in a study at Princeton University said Facebook has peaked and it is set to lose 80 percent of its users by 2017!
Facebook had over 1.2 billion users now. The study predicted that Facebook will see a massive exodus soon.
Comparing Facebook to the spread of an infectious disease, Princeton PhD students Joshua Spechler and Johan Cannarella had predicted that Facebook will virtually be abandoned by 80 per cent users by 2017, when its `outbreak’ would have run its course.
The two researchers employed epidemiological modelling, which is used for measuring the spread of any infectious disease, to predict that eventually Facebook will also start declining fast – just like MySpace and Bebo.
According to the researchers, Facebook “is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase.’’ This abandonment rate will pick up fast through 2015 to 2017, they had said.
The two researchers argued that “ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models.
“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.’’
Facebook was started in 2004, and by2014 it had grown to become the world’s biggest social networking site with 1.2 billion users. On the other hand, Myspace, which was started in 2003 and peaked in 2007 with 300 million users, eventually started fading in 2011. (Updated from the story which first appeared on January 23, 2014)
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