Facebook plague doomed to die out
 

Social notworking site Facebook has similarities with an infectious disease and is likely to die off in exactly the same way.

Tesearchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80 percent of its users by 2017 by drawing similarities between Facebook's rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease.

John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler wrote in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv that ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out.

Epidemiological models can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, "where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery."

They based their models on data that reflect the number of times "Facebook" has been typed into Google as a search term.

http://news.techeye.net/science/face...med-to-die-out