Facebook to Lose 80% of Users by 2017, Study Reveals

Around 80 per cent of people who use Facebook are going to quit it by 2017, claim Princeton University researchers. They argue that people are gradually getting "immune" to the social networking Web site.

The study of Facebook catastrophe was done with the comparative analysis between growth curves of epidemics and those of Facebook along with other social networking giants. According to scientists who compared Facebook with an infectious disease, Facebook is going to be "eradicated" from the world just the way bubonic plague did; The Guardian reports.

Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella from the mechanical and aerospace engineering department of the university predicted the future of Facebook on the basis of the number of times it is searched on Google. Google Trends showed that Facebook had started becoming "less popular" on the search engine since its peak in December 2012.

Mr Spechler and Mr Cannarella compared ideas with diseases in their paper called "Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics". They argue that both ideas and diseases tend to get infectious among people until they start dying out. Facebook, which is going to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of its commencement on February 4, has been able to survive significantly longer than its rivals such as Bebo and MySpace.

In October 2013, Facebook has reportedly listed about 1.2 billion active users. By the end of January, it is expected to update its investors on the traffic members. There has been a steep decline in the number of user accessing the Web site from the desktop. However, there can be a logical explanation behind it. More number of users is using Facebook from their mobile devices.

Mr Spechler and Mr Cannarella used the SIR model in their study, which is used for diseases. It is based on Susceptible-Infected-Recovered process which makes equations for mapping the spread as well as the recovery of a particular epidemic.