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Facebook Is a Plague That'll Burn Out In a Few Years, Says Study
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook will bleed the majority of its users over the next three years, according to Princeton researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, who arrived at that conclusion by comparing Facebook to an infectious disease. That's sort of logical: both Facebook and viruses depend on networks of human beings to "transmit" and grow; and just as people shake off viruses, they should (according to the theory, at least) eventually stop using Facebook. But how do a bunch of determined scientists actually trace Facebook's theoretical rise and fall? Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset (various other studies have also relied on Google Trends as the basis for predictions). Those search queries reached a peak in December 2012. The researchers took that dataset and plugged it into prebuilt model for the spread of infectious disease (PDF), tweaked things a bit, and found that Facebook—like any plague that's burned through a significant portion of a population—will decline before the decade is out. Seem unlikely? To be fair, the researchers ran the term 'MySpace' through their model and found it traced that social network's rise and fall with some accuracy; but Facebook is much larger than MySpace at its peak, and woven much more pervasively throughout the fabric of the Web—thousands of Websites rely on the Network That Zuckerberg Built to connect with users, advertise, sell products, and much more. That prevalence alone should slow any Facebook decline. In addition, Facebook has begun releasing standalone apps such as Messenger, as part of a broader strategy to expand the company's branding and functionality beyond its core Website. Whether or not you like this theory that Facebook will 'burn out' has any validity, it's clear the social network is trying to mutate."
This "study" is mostly bullshit. This article sums it up nicely:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
If anything, Facebook will contract to an identity service provider used by web sites such as Answers.com and The Huffington Post to verify that each account is associated to one real person.
It might do that, but even teens are starting to realize that Facebook provides way too much information to be uses as an identity service provider.
Still THIS particular study seems a bit flaky, because it was done by looking for the frequency that "Facebook" appears in Google searches (which presumably includes simply entering "facebook.com" in the Chrome address bar, which some people still insist results in a search.)
With Facebook ALREADY being the home page of the addicted, and with a Facebook app on just about every mobile device, not many people have to search for Facebook, as it is already at their fingertips. According to Alexa statistics, 99.28% of visitors arrive directly at the site, and only 7.7% arrived from Google. This just screams "Browser Home Page".
Decline in search results might not be indicative of decline in usage. (Unfortunately).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But G+ does not have my friends there, nor does it have an official app for my phone (and I'm not about to enter my Google credientals on some 3rd party app). I don't see it really taking off until Google stops using it as marketing ploy.
Of course they may also shut it down any time with a warning of a few months, even if it seems a remote possibility now...
LinkedIn does *not* demand email accounts or address books. They may give you the option to import such, but you can easily say 'no' and use LinkedIn without such. I did that with my account.