'Facebook could lose 80pc of users by 2017'

Researchers at the Princeton University predict that Facebook's popularity will plummet in the coming years

Facebook's growth is set to come to an abupt halt, just as an infectious disease spreads rapidly and suddenly dies, according to a new report.

Researchers at Princeton University in the United States predict that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80pc of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.

This conclusion has been reached by comparing the adoption and abandonment dynamics of social networks to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," the reserachers wrote in their paper.

"Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. 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."
The researchers used MySpace as an example of how adoption and abandonment of a social network can mimick the spread of infectious disease. MySpace, founded in 2003, reached its peak in 2008 with 75.9 million unique monthly visits in the US before subsequently decaying to obscurity by 2011.
Using Google search query data as a proxy for social network usership, the researchers produced the following graph, illustrating the rise and fall of MySpace and Facebook respectively: