Facebook will lose 80% of its 1.2 billion users by 2017. That’s what 2 Princeton PhD students have determined.
The study, by two Princeton Ph.D. candidates Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, has created a stir by comparing Facebook to an infectious disease that spreads rapidly and then dies out.
In the study, “Epidemiological modelling of online social networks dynamics,” the Princeton students argue that Facebook is already “beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase.”
“In this paper, we analyse the adoption and abandonment dynamics of online social networks by drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,” Spechler and Cannarella write.
Facebook, they suggest, is an idea, a fad that, like an illness, can spread – and then eventually fade away. They cited the rise and fall of MySpace.
“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out,” they write.
This may come as a surprise to the idiot investors that have driven the price of the stock to $55 per share, at a 140 PE ratio. They are counting on Facebook to grow at a rapid pace over the next ten years. You can bet the ranch that Wall Street is wrong again. They never tire of being wrong or fleecing muppets.
Facebook is already dying. My teenagers use it less and less. It’s mostly being used by middle aged women who want the world to know what they had for dinner and what they are watching on TV. Facebook is part of the techno-narcissistic disease that has consumed this country over the last decade. The reality of our financial situation will be the cure for this disease. Shallowness and self worship will be replaced by the need to survive.
Make sure you post this to Facebook. I need likes. Then I can Twitter about the number of likes and tell my connected friends on Linkedin.
We deserve what we get, good and hard.
