By Ogova Ondego
Published January 25, 2014
A 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.
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, Facebook, that marks its 10th anniversary on February 4, 2014, will die shortly thereafter.
The forecast, eTurboNews says, is based on the number of times ‘Facebook’ is typed into a search engine. The Google Trends service charts indicates that searches for ‘Facebook’ reached peak 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.
If you are a Facebook addict (well, user!), how will you cope with the possible death of your platform? Who are the possible successors of Facebook? Will it be YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Linked-In, GooglePlus, MySpace, WAYN, Twitter or WhatsApp?
