Researchers Say Facebook Could Die Out by 2017

In an academic paper, the researchers lay out data that compares the growth of Facebook to an infectious disease—c'mon it's not that bad, guys—and find that the social network will lose 80% of its peak user base over the next three years. 

Ideas (like Facebook) are similar to diseases, the researchers argue. They're spread through communicative contact between different people. Ultimately, though, people lose interest in the idea and stop passing it on. (Or, if we're still comparing ideas to diseases, they die/gain immunity to the disease.) So like the bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually fail to spread. 

John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.

“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 claim in a paper entitled Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics.

 

My head fucking hurts. Anyway, Facebook did have a response to the Princetonians today by arguing that Princeton is in danger of dying off. Basically, the blog post criticizes Princeton's method of data collecting—they measured Facebook's popularity by how many times the word was typed into Google—and made a similar search for “Princeton“:

In keeping with the scientific principle “correlation equals causation,” our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend:

 

I think I've stumbled onto the world's nerdiest slap fight. Let's all back out and forget we were here.

[H/T: The Guardian]