Fame graph of Facebook will reduce by 80% within three years: US scientist

Washington: According to US scientists, Facebook will lose 80 per cent of users within three years before eventually dying out “like the bubonic plague.”

At Princeton University, researchers said that the Facebook has spread like an infectious disease but users are slowly becoming immune to its attractions.

They also claimed that the site will be largely abandoned by 2017 after comparing the growth curve of epidemics like the plague to those of online social networks.

Notify that Facebook will celebrate its 10th birthday on February 4. But it has outlasted rivals such as MySpace and Bebo and the experts claim it will lose 80 per cent of its users within the next three years.

Researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. They discovered that Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have begun to tail off.

The authors report in a paper entitled ‘Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics’, “Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models.”

They said, “Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other.”

They also added that users “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 is due to update investors on its latest traffic numbers at the end of the month. Its most recent figures, released in October, showed nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users.

Company’s chief financial officer David Ebersman had also admitted on an earnings call with analysts that during the previous three month, “We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens.”

Web experts said that the decline in desktop traffic to Facebook may be partially explained by the fact that many people now only access the network via their mobile phones.

Bureau Report