[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

[Rex Troumbley]

For those who haven't seen yet, Facebook has conducted its own instant (and
hilarious) study which finds that "Princeton will have only half its
current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all."

https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-princeton/10151947421191849

Facebook ends by noting, "As data scientists, we wanted to give a fun
reminder that not all research is created equal – and some methods of
analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions." Facebook's stock values doesn't
seem to have been effected much by either study, though Huffington Post and
Gawker's probably got a little boost in traffic as a result.

---
Rex Troumbley, PhD candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Hawaii at Manoa



On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 8:26 PM, Marj Kibby <marj.kibby at newcastle.edu.au>wrote:

> Is anyone else reminded of the Times' 1995 cover article on Cyberporn by
> Martin Rimm?
>
> Marj
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org>
> on behalf of Robert Ackland <robert.ackland at anu.edu.au>
> Sent: Sunday, 26 January 2014 5:00 PM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [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
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> 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/>
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