Facebook Is a Plague That'll Burn Out In a Few Years, Says Study 338
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook will bleed the majority of its users over the next three years, according to Princeton researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, who arrived at that conclusion by comparing Facebook to an infectious disease. That's sort of logical: both Facebook and viruses depend on networks of human beings to "transmit" and grow; and just as people shake off viruses, they should (according to the theory, at least) eventually stop using Facebook. But how do a bunch of determined scientists actually trace Facebook's theoretical rise and fall? Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset (various other studies have also relied on Google Trends as the basis for predictions). Those search queries reached a peak in December 2012. The researchers took that dataset and plugged it into prebuilt model for the spread of infectious disease (PDF), tweaked things a bit, and found that Facebook—like any plague that's burned through a significant portion of a population—will decline before the decade is out. Seem unlikely? To be fair, the researchers ran the term 'MySpace' through their model and found it traced that social network's rise and fall with some accuracy; but Facebook is much larger than MySpace at its peak, and woven much more pervasively throughout the fabric of the Web—thousands of Websites rely on the Network That Zuckerberg Built to connect with users, advertise, sell products, and much more. That prevalence alone should slow any Facebook decline. In addition, Facebook has begun releasing standalone apps such as Messenger, as part of a broader strategy to expand the company's branding and functionality beyond its core Website. Whether or not you like this theory that Facebook will 'burn out' has any validity, it's clear the social network is trying to mutate."
I'll be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
..when it's finally gone /first
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Re:I'll be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but in the last two years, lots of smartphones have come out with a Facebook app as standard. Many people are using those rather than using a browser.
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Re:I'll be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'll be happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I'll be happy (Score:4, Funny)
This is terrible! If you type Google into Google, you can break the internet!
Civilisation would tear itself apart, like an angry child with a napkin!
It's even worse than that. The Chinese discovered that if you do that, all your internet traffic belong to Wyoming.
Re:I'll be happy (Score:4, Informative)
Not that peculiar when you consider Firefox's default behaviour if you type an invalid URL in the address bar is to run a Google search for the term. So if someone types "Google" in the address bar (but without the ".com"), it would count as a Google search for "Google".
Still not exactly bright user behaviour, but not quite as stupid (and considerably more believable) than people visiting the Google website and then searching for the keyword "Google"...
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Browser designers are encouraging this by merging the search and address bars and taking away the old address bar behaviour (i.e. treat it as a host name and perhaps try adding .com if there is no dot) and searching by default for anything that is not obviously a host name. One can only think the search engine provider kickbacks are worth annoying people like me.
Re: I'll be happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, FB has a very robust internal search engine. I never used Google to search it to begin with - the thought never occurred to me. I use Google all the time, but when I want to search a specific website...I go to that site.
All the doom and gloom about FB doesn't take into account one thing: for many of us, it's our address book. Hundreds of friends from college, high school, former work places - when I want to get in touch with someone I don't regularly communicate with, that is where I go. So even though I don't sit and read everyone's posts every day like I may have at one point, it's still an essential and valuable tool in my life (even if I just go to find someone's regular email or phone number). I cannot tell you how amazing that ability is.
I needed a piece of art done for a cover of something I was publishing recently. I knew a girl I'm college who dated a good friend of mine. I happened to notice one day a year or so ago that she was doing custom art for people. When this project came up, I immediately thought of her because the style of art I needed was exactly what she was doing. I wrote her a FB message, and 24 hours later I had my cover, exactly how I envisioned it, and got it for free - and she got a credit for her resume. That would have never happened without FB, and things like that happen all the time.
What is getting old are the Facebook haters. If you don't like it, don't use it. But seriously, STFU about it. You doth protest too much. If you say you are sick of reading mundane details about everyone's lives, stop fucking reading them. If you spend your time doing something you don't like, the only idiot is you.
Facebook is an amazing TOOL, if you are using it strictly for entertainment good for you - but just because someone can't see beyond the "I had tuna salad for lunch today" or "I popped a really big zit - look at this!" posts, doesn't take away from the fact that used intelligently, it can be a very useful and ultimately gives us something that wasn't possible before it existed - a living address book of everyone we know. It's how you use it that determines if it's a god-send, or an utter waste of time.
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Don't be too optimistic. Not all infectious diseases burn themselves out. Malaria has been endemic for thousands of years.
hey, and it came from rats! (Score:4, Funny)
the coincidences are just too many to be random...
\dot? (Score:4, Funny)
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Login with Facebook to Post a Comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Login with Facebook to Post a Comment (Score:5, Informative)
If anything, Facebook will contract to an identity service provider used by web sites such as Answers.com and The Huffington Post to verify that each account is associated to one real person.
It might do that, but even teens are starting to realize that Facebook provides way too much information to be uses as an identity service provider.
Still THIS particular study seems a bit flaky, because it was done by looking for the frequency that "Facebook" appears in Google searches (which presumably includes simply entering "facebook.com" in the Chrome address bar, which some people still insist results in a search.)
With Facebook ALREADY being the home page of the addicted, and with a Facebook app on just about every mobile device, not many people have to search for Facebook, as it is already at their fingertips. According to Alexa statistics [alexa.com], 99.28% of visitors arrive directly at the site, and only 7.7% arrived from Google. This just screams "Browser Home Page".
Decline in search results might not be indicative of decline in usage. (Unfortunately).
Re:Login with Facebook to Post a Comment (Score:5, Funny)
99.28% of visitors arrive directly at the site, and only 7.7% arrived from Google
But what about the other -6.98% ?
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Arrival destination (which page they arrived at) is not from the same universe as source (where they arrived from).
Those two would never be expected to sum to 100%.
99.28% arrive directly to www.facebook.com
but only 7.7% of those people came from google.com
This indicates they weren't searching for facebook, or even entering facebook (without a complete domain name) in Chrome browser which results in a search. They were direct hits, which, as I indicated, sounds like a home page setting, or a mobile app usag
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99.28% of visitors arrive directly at the site, and only 7.7% arrived from Google
But what about the other -6.98% ?
Clearly they left the site.
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Is there really anything that stops me from creating a few dozen Facebook identities? Yes, it's more work than inventing new usernames to spam a blog, but it doesn't seem all that difficult really.
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Unfortunately, More to Come (Score:4, Insightful)
Frienster > Myspace > Facebook > SpaceFace > [and so on] ...
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Friendface (Score:5, Funny)
IT Crowd FTW:
http://youtu.be/6rNgCnY1lPg
Is it a plague or more like the common cold? (Score:5, Funny)
Like LinedIN? (Score:2, Insightful)
I went to a job fair recently.
I was told that they weren't taking resumes there, but asked if I had a LinkedIN profile.
When I expressed that I didn't because I don't like social networks, I was corrected. "LinkedIN isn't like Facebook where you get posts of cats."
And he explained that they did ALL recruiting from LinkedIN.
My head assploded wondering why THEY were at a job fair, but never the less, I created my LinkedIN profile - sweet as honey - with my Github projects. No bites. No one even looks at th
Re:Like LinedIN? (Score:5, Informative)
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Their "model" isn't even sophisticated enough to count FB accounts. They are simply counting people typing the word "facebook" into Google.
Re:Is it a plague or more like the common cold? (Score:4, Informative)
Does anybody else... not dislike facebook? To be honest, I don't get why it's so in vogue to declare one's hatred for facebook.
Speaking for myself, I have no issue with social networking itself. It's the company's relentless assault on privacy, and in particular, its practice of retroactively weakening the respect for privacy in its of terms of service, that keeps me away.
Mom rule (Score:5, Insightful)
My 70 year old mother uses Facebook.
Once a technology reaches that level of integration into society, it, or at least the core product benefit, will be with us forever.
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Yeah, I'm not buying that Facebook is going away. I think it's ripe for a coup, but it's too integrated into the way people think; much like googling is as reflexive and act as checking your email. That being said, FB's shameless privacy intrusions mean I've never stayed logged in, rarely use it, and only keep an account as a place holder should someone from the past try to look me up.
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Devil's advocate here: Other than being the local "watering hole", what service or services does FB provide that nobody else does?
For authentication, MS and Google can provide that, or one can use OpenID. In fact, during the age of GINAs with XP, I had a machine that authenticated users using their Slashdot IDs.
For walls, cat pictures, random ramblings, and political statements, the Web has done that for decades. MySpace, G+, Blogger, Livejournal, Deadjournal, and many custom Web pages have this.
For onli
OpenID trustworthy? (Score:2)
For authentication, MS and Google can provide that, or one can use OpenID.
Google already provides OpenID. But whether OpenID can replace Facebook authentication depends on whether a particular relying party trusts a particular OpenID provider not to grant distinct identifiers to sockpuppets of one real person. With a verified Facebook account, at least you can be sure that the identifier is connected to a cell phone subscription.
For online messaging, SMS, MMS, old fashioned E-mail, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, talk, and rwall have been around. Similar with offline messages and group chats.
I was under the impression that Facebook's spam filter had more teeth than e-mail or the popular IM systems because Facebook can apply stronger penalties
Do you need more? (Score:5, Insightful)
It needs no more than being a ubiquitous water cooler. What is compelling about FB is that it's a stream of consciousness of your friends and relatives. You can leave it for a while and come back and you haven't really "missed" anything. It's the many-to-many with no programming, scripting, or other aggregator that makes it useful to everyone.
Here's what makes it special: you get to stay in touch with people you wouldn't normally stay in touch with, or even want to necessarily. WTF is that about? I have quite a few friends on FB - old (like HS) and new (just met at a class) - with whom I share enough common ground to get through half a beer in a bar before the uncomfortable silence sets in. With FB, I don't lose those friends to the physical and temporal distance which separates us - instead, I pick up bits and pieces they like to share about how their lives are going. As a result, an old 1/2 beer friend recently visited town, but we polished off an entire pitcher because we knew enough about one another - after 20 years of not seeing each other - that we had several things in common. I might keep up with 15-20 people, tops, but through facebook I actually still feel connected to a couple hundred. Not everybody journals, and of those, I'm not going to go to 200 separate pages, and even if I did, the interactive nature just isn't there.
Think Wal-mart (Score:3)
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
There's nothing that Wal-mart sells that can't be bought elsewhere. But like Facebook, the reason it dominates is because it does all of that in one place, has a good back end (understatement for Wal-mart), has a well-established customer base that is content to stick with what they know despite what all the "cool" kids think, and leverages its size and reach well to keep its advantages intact.
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My 70 year old mother uses Facebook.
I will raise you with:
My 14 year old nephew recently closed his Facebook account after many years because "nothing is going on" there anymore. Possibly too many adults on Facebook now?
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My 14 year old nephew recently closed his Facebook account after many years because "nothing is going on" there anymore. Possibly too many adults on Facebook now?
Maybe.
Maybe he decided it's no fun since, now that he's over the age of 13, it's no longer illegal for him to register on websites without written consent of his parents, so he lost interest.
You probably think I'm kidding. Only slightly; only slightly.
Re: Mom rule (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you'll find that most teenagers are using other services and bailing from FB because it's what "the adults around them use." And no teenager wants mom, dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles looking over their shoulder.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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apparently at 2.58 million
http://consumerist.com/2013/08... [consumerist.com]
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My 70 year old mother uses Facebook.
it... will be with us forever.
Like an Oldsmobile? :p
An Oldsmobile is as big as a Buick (Score:3)
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Yeah - none of the other social networks, including MySpace, had anywhere near the penetration that FB does now. Across age groups and across different countries. I live outside the US and although we were certainly aware MySpace existed, even in its heyday I knew almost nobody with a MySpace account. But Facebook? 1.2 billion users ... that's literally every second man, woman and child in the developed world (roughly).
It's popular because it's so useful single point of call to keep in touch with almost eve
Re:Mom rule (Score:4, Insightful)
Still listens to music (CDs), eats butter, and yes, has an electric bed warmer. (Canada, it's cold here)
Re:Mom rule (Score:5, Funny)
So you predict that in the future only the Amish will use Facebook?
Viruses Burn Out? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kind of like how the flu season peaked in February 2013, and now there will never be big flu outbreaks again.
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Just a second there professor (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset"
This is probably too obvious of a hole to poke in a scientific work, but... How do they know that it doesn't mean that users are either a) giving up using Google or b) remembering where the fuck to find facebook.com? It would be interesting if they tried the same trick on GMail (a service that grew fast from word of mouth but is decidedly not in decline last i checked) and see what their prediction says.
Facebook declined; Gmail did not (Score:2)
Re:Just a second there professor (Score:5, Insightful)
I never type facebook.com or search it. I click the app icon on my phone. Seems their number coincide very much with the popularity growth of smart phones.
These people should focus on other studies. This is a waste of time for anybody to read.
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A big part of it is, I think, that people are now using Facebook apps on their phones and/or tablets. From the people I know, facebook seems to be somewhere between texting and email, in terms of significance of communication.
Facebook is a thing, 'facebook.com' is a site. We don't do web sites anymore, this is the 'mobile' era.
Their 'peak' nicely coincides with the first Christmas where people bought tablets and started supplanting their desktops with portable devices. With a lot of work places blocking sit
Same (Score:4, Funny)
Facebook is AOL without the CDs.
Remember Slap Bracelets and Pocket Bikes? (Score:2)
Social networking, or rather doing so on a particular website, is a fad; it's no different than slap bracelets, Troll dolls, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, etc., etc., etc.
Eventually, the unwashed masses will find some other new 'toy' to obsess over, and Facebook will turn into the morose, resigned version of Woody from Toy Story III*.
* I assume; to be honest, I never actually saw that one.
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Remember cell phones, Islam, and the Republican party. Not everythig new is a fad.
Except Facebook isn't "something new." It's a company that has capitalized on the recent phenomena of social networking (which is "something new," and will likely exist so long as near-instant global communications are still feasible). Just like the companies that capitalized on the popularity of pocket bikes back in about 2005. Pocket bikes still exist, but since they aren't experiencing the explosive growth they once did, you'll find there are a lot fewer companies making them today then back when they we
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I doubt people are going to get over the whole "use the internet to communicate with friends" thing any time soon.
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Probably not, but they will get over doing it on Facebook.
Coulda swore I made that pretty obvious...
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You should. After I did, my first thought was "Holy hell, how often is the third of a movie series better than both the original and the sequel?"
Dubious Analogy (Score:3)
While I would not be disappointed if this were true, the whole thing seems to be predicated on a dubious analogy. What is playing the role of the immune system here? In the case of MySpace, Facebook seems to have played that role.
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That is what I was thinking. Facebook helped kill MySpace, it didn't just die on it's own. Plus, nobody can stay sick with a virus or bacteria forever. They either get over it or die. There is nothing that will force you to abandon Facebook after using it for a year or two. People who like it can use it for their whole lives if they want. I guess something like Herpes or maybe even HIV with the current drugs might be similar in a way.
They mention how businesses use Facebook to connect to their customers. In
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Well, there's the alternative of host extinction.
But yeah. Just because two things grow similarly does NOT mean they dissipate similarly.
All things end (Score:5, Insightful)
When the parents and grandparents start using it the "kids" tend to move elsewhere. Eventually the parents and grandparents follow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Humanity is doomed to extinction (Score:2, Funny)
Markets are maturing (Score:2)
I am reminded how Microsoft managed to "mature" the WinTel PC market with a steady flow of bugs, upgrades, dropped support and other frustrations. After Windows XP, people were reluctant to move to anything new. And after Vista, people were down-right pissed off. Windows 7 is livable but Microsoft had to compete with tablets so they are forcing Windows 8.x on everyone and even the device makers are getting pretty bothered.
With all the comings and goings of social networking services, people are also begi
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I have a different view of facebook. It's a place where I can reconnect or even stay in contact with people I've met over the years. I think that after linkedin it's one of the best networking tools out there. For another product to come and replace this one it would have to be seamless from the user's point of view.
I don't think so, but... (Score:2)
On the other hand, ten years ago I thought myspace would be around forever, and we all know how that turned out.
Only a trend? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm glad to hear that vanity, gossip, and pursuit of social status are fads that will eventually go away like skinny jeans.
Except... (Score:3)
Except that the vast majority of Facebook's traffic never passes through Google...
Not a great study (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
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That will speed its decline (Score:2)
thousands of Websites rely on the Network That Zuckerberg Built to connect with users, advertise, sell products, and much more.
I'm pretty sure that will speed its decline. What user wants Facebook to help give advertisements? I dare you to go ask random people on the street about that.
Virus or bacteria? (Score:2)
What if Facebook is more like stomach bacteria where we evolve to utterly depend on it?
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Nah, it seems more like the stomach virus that causes me to lose my lunch.
Or maybe like AIDS... (Score:2)
Minor difference (Score:2)
Although applying the concept is interesting in theory, all trolling aside a foundational difference that makes this comparison nonsense is that *most* human's don't want the virus they contract whereas *most* Facebook users want to participate on Facebook until its usefulness expires. Facebook's usefulness has an indeterminate expiration that is subjective per individual (or group of like-minded individuals) whereas the virus is counter-useful. Now, if they were to apply disease patterns of a virus whose
Facebook vs. MySpace (Score:3, Interesting)
What we could see happen is that users abandon the service to connect to real people, and only use it to connect to brands, because the brands are demanding it. Over time (several more years) the brands will likely deprioritize their presence on the network, because people don't engage with them the way they used to. Go watch a commercial break on TV right now, I bet that one of the ads uses facebook.com/brandname as their website address. How insane is that? Snickers uses facebook.com/snickers instead of Snickers.com! Why would you do this? Facebook limits the opportunities that brands have to engage, and yet brands have played right into it, because the network is so powerful.
I do believe Facebook will live on as a way to authenticate and connect with other websites. It's a useful way to verify someone's real name, their social connections, and that they are a "good actor." See: many dating websites.
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... why would anyone go to snickers.com?
not so fast (Score:4, Informative)
As for the trend of a decline in googling for "facebook", that could just as easily reflect the fact that fewer people need to search for it. Either they've bookmarked it, it's their home page, their browser is smart enough to do URL completion, or it's perpetually at the top of their history, so they never hit Google on the way to it.
Don't get me wrong: Facebook will go away at some point, just like the phone system and Interstates will fade away before humanity does. But projections that it is already in decline (or trending toward that inflection point) may be premature.
Social networks have a life cycle, like nightclubs (Score:2)
Social networks have a life cycle. If they become cool, they grow. They grow too big, become uncool, the cool people leave, and they decline. Past top social networks include The Well, AOL, Geocities, and Myspace. Facebook's web traffic peaked in 2012.
A key problem for Facebook: they don't have a phone. Google has a phone OS, and uses it to lock users in and spy on them. Facebook doesn't have that power.
is that summary actually accurate??? (Score:3)
Did they really assume that a drop in people searching for Facebook equates to a drop in people using Facebook? Why not just a drop in new users trying to find Facebook???
Facebook isn't going away. (Score:5, Funny)
People who make those sorts of comments do not understand what Facebook is.
To understand that, you have to be aware of who funded Facebook and bankrolled all of it.
Which of course were various military types.
Facebook has never made a profit, and probably never will. But it isn't there to make a profit.
It is there to gather intelligence.
As long as it serves that purpose, it isn't going anywhere.
-Hackus
Decline of Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that it's at least as likely that this signals a decline of Google instead. When I searched "trends" recently for things like "algebra" and "math help" it seemed liked the searches for even those fairly eternal subjects were trailing off in recent years. Comparing Google to Facebook, it seems that Google's the one that's flailing around more recently, with farts like G+, canceled projects, draconian merging of accounts, etc.
Where's the "like" button? (Score:3)
I'd like to "like" this story.
Facebook's reply (Score:3)
Slow death for sure (Score:3)
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So yeah, like it or not, facebook is here to stay, probably longer than 2017
Myspace is still around too.
https://myspace.com/ [myspace.com]
Nobody really suggests facebook will be gone in 2017, merely that like myspace, nobody will care it still exists.
Fingers crossed.
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Nobody really suggests facebook will be gone in 2017, merely that like myspace, nobody will care it still exists.
... except pedos and the feds who love (to hunt) them.
Re:already dead to me (Score:4, Funny)
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What are you talking about? It's FB marketing that modded him down to -1.
Re:already dead to me (Score:5, Informative)
But G+ does not have my friends there, nor does it have an official app for my phone (and I'm not about to enter my Google credientals on some 3rd party app). I don't see it really taking off until Google stops using it as marketing ploy.
Of course they may also shut it down any time with a warning of a few months, even if it seems a remote possibility now...
Re:any research (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a glaring flaw, directly related to the old phrase, "There are 3 types of lies; Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics".
They're basing the trend on the frequency of the string "facebook" being typed into Google search.
In 2012, they saw the peak.
Guess what? People use smart phones A LOT more, and they use the various facebook apps, and when one wants a facebook app, they search the relevant app store (iTunes, Google Play, etc).
My money would bet that smart phone use covers the dip on the search trend, but even if it doesn't fully cover it, it's got to play a part, which would (almost certainly) tarnish their results (maybe it still will die, but it'll just take 3x's as long as they thought due to bad assumptions made about the google trend numbers).
It'll probably still die someday, for some loose definition of die (is geocities still around?)
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I can imagine there will be a drop in users, but the idea that it will go extinct in three years seems out to lunch to me. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's methodologically sound to say "MySpace went tits up, so will Facebook". Facebook has done a lot to try to increase the capabilities and services users can use, out of sheer necessity of keeping them on board. It strikes me that Facebook is trying to do the exact opposite of Myspace.
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The spread may be similar to STD/STIs which obviously have a positive feature in their spread
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dumb data set & analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah this research is virtually worthless...they make an increasingly common mistake of taking an analogy that indicates correlation, namely: "humans usage of networks is similar to viral infection of cells" and treat it as if it is some sort of physics law that is applicable in all ways. It's lazy research!
besides their bad analogy resulting in a bad research question, they didn't gather any data, they just ran some crosstabs on an existing data set...THIS data set, FTA:
to see if usage of 'facebook.com' "dies" like viruses die, you examine numbers of people who close their accounts. the worst is the part in parenthesis...sure there are times when number of google searches correlates well with popularity or usage, but its such a ridiculously tenuous connection & it doesn't matter how many other studies have used similar data sets.
facebook.com is not like a plague in one key way, people *want* its functionality just not its privacy invasion and lack of control.
to properly do this study, they can still let it 'spread' virally...but the virus analogy breaks down there...they need to have another factor that is a **REPLACEMENT NETWORK** that spreads in its place
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Life for many is moving from one social network to the another.
I have a social network that I've never abandoned - meeting people face to face (and this from someone who is often described as anti-social).