[Air-L] Facebook Is About to Lose 80% of Its Users, Study Says Read more: Facebook Is About to Lose 80% of Its Users, Study Says | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2014/01/21/facebook-is-about-to-lose-80-of-its-users-study-says/#ixzz2rSfZNmEo

[Robert Ackland]

Catchy title for the press release.  I'm surprised a study that hasn't been peer-reviewed is getting such attention.  But then again, FB is a publicly listed company so I guess any research potentially related to its market value will get attention.  And hey, I'm just shining more light on the study myself, with this post...

I don't know why the authors conceptualise social media adoption using the 'disease spread' analogy.  Possibly social media adoption is more like adoption of previous technological innovations such as the telephone, since a social network site provides a flow of services like the telephone does, and there is the network effect.  The question is whether FB will be able to maintain its market share of the SNS market and I would have thought economics models of markets might be able to provide insights here, rather than this endemic approach (pun intended) of "let's model anything involving social behaviour [or even market behaviour with network effects] as a disease"...

Rob Ackland

On 26/01/14 11:54, Joly MacFie wrote:

http://business.time.com/2014/01/21/facebook-is-about-to-lose-80-of-its-users-study-says/

Facebook’s growth will eventually come to a quick end, much like an
infectious disease that spreads rapidly and suddenly dies, say Princeton
researchers who are using diseases to model the life cycles of social media.

Disease models can be used to understand the mass adoption and subsequent
flight from online social networks, researchers at Princeton’s Department
of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering say in a study released Jan. 17.
The study has not been peer-reviewed. Updating traditional models on
disease spread to assume that “recovery” requires contact with a
nondiseased member — i.e., a nonuser of Facebook (“recovered” member of the
population) — researchers predicted that Facebook would see a rapid
decline, causing the site to lose 80% of its peak user base between 2015
and 2017.

Basically, Facebook users will lose interest in Facebook over time as their
peers lose interest — if the model is correct. ”Ideas, like diseases, have
been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying
out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,”
write the researchers.

You can check out the full study here. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf




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Assoc. Prof. Robert Ackland
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
Australian National University

e-mail: robert.ackland at anu.edu.au<mailto:robert.ackland at anu.edu.au>
homepage: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj
project: http://voson.anu.edu.au<http://voson.anu.edu.au/>