Engineers at Princeton have predicted that the social media giant will fall out of favour with the public just as quickly as Myspace once did. Comparing Facebook to an 'infectious disease' that users then 'recover' from, the data concludes that a rapid decline in users will occur between 2015 and 2017.
Engineers at Princeton have predicted that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant, Facebook, will fall out of favour with the public just as quickly as Myspace once did. Likening Facebook to an ‘infectious disease’ that users then ‘recover’ from, the data concludes that a rapid decline in users will occur between 2015 and 2017.
While the ‘infectious disease’ analogy might not be the most flattering the engineers could have picked, it’s true that both Online Social Network (OSN) dynamics and contagious sicknesses do share extremely similar characteristics. Right from the offset, both spread like wildfire, passing from person to person in close networks, before peaking and finally declining.
The researchers explain: “Despite the recent success of Facebook and Twitter, the last decade also provides numerous examples of OSNs that have risen and fallen in popularity, most notably MySpace… [making them of] financial interest to incumbent and emerging OSN providers and their stakeholders.”
Using Myspace as a prime example of an OSN that has already gone through its life and death cycle, the authors argue that, like diseases, the ‘ideas’ that interest users about social networks soon dissipate as they move onto new trends: “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.”
A clever idea, yes, but one that isn’t short of problems. Firstly, the researchers are basing their theory on how often the term ‘Facebook’ is searched for in the Google bar, arguing it is already in decline – an outdated idea when one thinks of the intense popularity of the Facebook app on the millions of smartphones and tablets scattered across the globe.
Secondly, these guys aren’t social media experts – they are engineers, with a theory that appears in a journey that hasn’t even been peer-reviewed yet, so brands on social media shouldn’t start panicking too soon.
UPDATE 24/01: Facebook has replied to what it calls the ‘intriguing’ data, rolling its eyes sarcastically at the “innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends.”
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