John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler of Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are using epidemiological models to understand the rise and fall of online social networks. (Epidemiology looks at how disease spreads and can be controlled.)
Their study, published on January 17, says that Facebook is going the MySpace way. The decline of MySpace between 2008 and 2011 was just as steep as its rise after being founded in 2003.
Facebook, according to the researchers, has similarly peaked and is now beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase.
There are already signs that people are beginning to tire of the idea, and the study predicts that Facebook will lose 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.
The 'recovery' from Facebook will have the same dynamics as how we recover from an infection: as infected members (FB users) come into contact with more and more recovered members (those who have quit FB), the social network will go into a downward spiral.
