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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."
..when it's finally gone /first
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.
Frienster > Myspace > Facebook > SpaceFace > [and so on] ...
IT Crowd FTW:
http://youtu.be/6rNgCnY1lPg
On the other hand, Facebook might be more like a cold -- something that everybody dislikes but cannot entirely avoid.
My 70 year old mother uses Facebook.
Once a technology reaches that level of integration into society, it, or at least the core product benefit, will be with us forever.
..don't panic
Kind of like how the flu season peaked in February 2013, and now there will never be big flu outbreaks again.
"Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset"
This is probably too obvious of a hole to poke in a scientific work, but... How do they know that it doesn't mean that users are either a) giving up using Google or b) remembering where the fuck to find facebook.com? It would be interesting if they tried the same trick on GMail (a service that grew fast from word of mouth but is decidedly not in decline last i checked) and see what their prediction says.
Facebook is AOL without the CDs.
While I would not be disappointed if this were true, the whole thing seems to be predicated on a dubious analogy. What is playing the role of the immune system here? In the case of MySpace, Facebook seems to have played that role.
When the parents and grandparents start using it the "kids" tend to move elsewhere. Eventually the parents and grandparents follow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I have done a Google Trends search for reproduction, and as you can see, interest has been steadily declining. Based on my findings, I conclude that humanity is no longer interested in procreation. By extrapolating into the future, you can see that all humans will have died out around the year 2140. Mark your calendars accordingly.
I'm glad to hear that vanity, gossip, and pursuit of social status are fads that will eventually go away like skinny jeans.
Except that the vast majority of Facebook's traffic never passes through Google...
Nice try g+ marketing team!
My grandparents had AOL.My parents had AOL. Everyone I knew had at least an AIM account. Where is AOL/AIM now?
I have to return some videotapes...
This "study" is mostly bullshit. This article sums it up nicely:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
There's a glaring flaw, directly related to the old phrase, "There are 3 types of lies; Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics".
They're basing the trend on the frequency of the string "facebook" being typed into Google search.
In 2012, they saw the peak.
Guess what? People use smart phones A LOT more, and they use the various facebook apps, and when one wants a facebook app, they search the relevant app store (iTunes, Google Play, etc).
My money would bet that smart phone use covers the dip on the search trend, but even if it doesn't fully cover it, it's got to play a part, which would (almost certainly) tarnish their results (maybe it still will die, but it'll just take 3x's as long as they thought due to bad assumptions made about the google trend numbers).
It'll probably still die someday, for some loose definition of die (is geocities still around?)
You can manage it, but you may never be able to make it fully go away.
The summary alludes to this, but Facebook has done a much better job integrating into society than MySpace ever did at it's peak. At best, MySpace was a good place to go see about a new band. Facebook has built alliances (either officially, or just by use) with almost every major brand, and every company in the western world. This kind of branding will be held on to by corporations big and small, as they know it's a good way to reach users.
What we could see happen is that users abandon the service to connect to real people, and only use it to connect to brands, because the brands are demanding it. Over time (several more years) the brands will likely deprioritize their presence on the network, because people don't engage with them the way they used to. Go watch a commercial break on TV right now, I bet that one of the ads uses facebook.com/brandname as their website address. How insane is that? Snickers uses facebook.com/snickers instead of Snickers.com! Why would you do this? Facebook limits the opportunities that brands have to engage, and yet brands have played right into it, because the network is so powerful.
I do believe Facebook will live on as a way to authenticate and connect with other websites. It's a useful way to verify someone's real name, their social connections, and that they are a "good actor." See: many dating websites.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
The assumption that Facebook will decline in the medium term is challenged by the examples of other networks which became pervasive enough that they became effectively perpetual (at least until disrupted by outside forces). The telephone network, the Interstate highway system, and the power grid have all held on and show no signs of going away (even as the telephone network merges with the internet). Oh yeah: and the internet.
As for the trend of a decline in googling for "facebook", that could just as easily reflect the fact that fewer people need to search for it. Either they've bookmarked it, it's their home page, their browser is smart enough to do URL completion, or it's perpetually at the top of their history, so they never hit Google on the way to it.
Don't get me wrong: Facebook will go away at some point, just like the phone system and Interstates will fade away before humanity does. But projections that it is already in decline (or trending toward that inflection point) may be premature.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I went to a job fair recently.
I was told that they weren't taking resumes there, but asked if I had a LinkedIN profile.
When I expressed that I didn't because I don't like social networks, I was corrected. "LinkedIN isn't like Facebook where you get posts of cats."
And he explained that they did ALL recruiting from LinkedIN.
My head assploded wondering why THEY were at a job fair, but never the less, I created my LinkedIN profile - sweet as honey - with my Github projects. No bites. No one even looks at them even though they are listed on my profile and resume. So mush for FOSS helping with hiring! NOTE: Github shows interest in projects and there are NO - zero- nothing - records of folks looking at my FOSS projects. I mean, WTF do I have to do?"
That wasn't what I was thinking of because LinkedIN pimps out their data - EVERYTHING is sold.
I created a profile because I need a job and as a peon, I have to conform and do what I need to do.
Of course, all these companies are looking for "out of the box thinkers" and folks who "do not conform to group think".
AND, the few recruiters who do contact me ONLY look at my current experience. They NEVER look past experience - which is ALL development. And now that I'm not working again, nothing. As soon as my profile showed an end date for my current job - and no begin date for a new one - nothing.
Unemployed means unemployable.
ANY and EVERY employer who says that they can't find qualified people is full of shit. And I'm moving on.
Payback is a bitch boys.
One day, I WILL be in a position to outsource IT (development same shit) services, and when I need IT folks, just wait. Just wait assholes. Just wait. IBM, NCR, Oracle, intel, Microsoft, EDS, Keane, .....just wait. Payback is a bitch!
Excuse me MR. Overpriced IT services corp, why should I go through you - a Third World talent reseller - and NOT hire Wipro or some other company that is actually based in the country YOU exploit? Hmmmm?!
Fuck you! That's why!
Can you GUARANTEE your date? Like Oracle DIDN'T for Oregon's Health system?! NO?! FUCK YOU! That's why!
Cock suckers! All of them!
Did they really assume that a drop in people searching for Facebook equates to a drop in people using Facebook? Why not just a drop in new users trying to find Facebook???
It needs no more than being a ubiquitous water cooler. What is compelling about FB is that it's a stream of consciousness of your friends and relatives. You can leave it for a while and come back and you haven't really "missed" anything. It's the many-to-many with no programming, scripting, or other aggregator that makes it useful to everyone.
Here's what makes it special: you get to stay in touch with people you wouldn't normally stay in touch with, or even want to necessarily. WTF is that about? I have quite a few friends on FB - old (like HS) and new (just met at a class) - with whom I share enough common ground to get through half a beer in a bar before the uncomfortable silence sets in. With FB, I don't lose those friends to the physical and temporal distance which separates us - instead, I pick up bits and pieces they like to share about how their lives are going. As a result, an old 1/2 beer friend recently visited town, but we polished off an entire pitcher because we knew enough about one another - after 20 years of not seeing each other - that we had several things in common. I might keep up with 15-20 people, tops, but through facebook I actually still feel connected to a couple hundred. Not everybody journals, and of those, I'm not going to go to 200 separate pages, and even if I did, the interactive nature just isn't there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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...
What are you talking about? It's FB marketing that modded him down to -1.
Their "model" isn't even sophisticated enough to count FB accounts. They are simply counting people typing the word "facebook" into Google.
People who make those sorts of comments do not understand what Facebook is.
To understand that, you have to be aware of who funded Facebook and bankrolled all of it.
Which of course were various military types.
Facebook has never made a profit, and probably never will. But it isn't there to make a profit.
It is there to gather intelligence.
As long as it serves that purpose, it isn't going anywhere.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Life for many is moving from one social network to the another.
I have a social network that I've never abandoned - meeting people face to face (and this from someone who is often described as anti-social).
the coincidences are just too many to be random...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What is your evidence that viruses never live symbiotically with humans?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
There's nothing that Wal-mart sells that can't be bought elsewhere. But like Facebook, the reason it dominates is because it does all of that in one place, has a good back end (understatement for Wal-mart), has a well-established customer base that is content to stick with what they know despite what all the "cool" kids think, and leverages its size and reach well to keep its advantages intact.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Oldsmobile is still very much with us. It's just called Buick now.
I think that it's at least as likely that this signals a decline of Google instead. When I searched "trends" recently for things like "algebra" and "math help" it seemed liked the searches for even those fairly eternal subjects were trailing off in recent years. Comparing Google to Facebook, it seems that Google's the one that's flailing around more recently, with farts like G+, canceled projects, draconian merging of accounts, etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
yeah this research is virtually worthless...they make an increasingly common mistake of taking an analogy that indicates correlation, namely: "humans usage of networks is similar to viral infection of cells" and treat it as if it is some sort of physics law that is applicable in all ways. It's lazy research!
besides their bad analogy resulting in a bad research question, they didn't gather any data, they just ran some crosstabs on an existing data set...THIS data set, FTA:
to see if usage of 'facebook.com' "dies" like viruses die, you examine numbers of people who close their accounts. the worst is the part in parenthesis...sure there are times when number of google searches correlates well with popularity or usage, but its such a ridiculously tenuous connection & it doesn't matter how many other studies have used similar data sets.
facebook.com is not like a plague in one key way, people *want* its functionality just not its privacy invasion and lack of control.
to properly do this study, they can still let it 'spread' virally...but the virus analogy breaks down there...they need to have another factor that is a **REPLACEMENT NETWORK** that spreads in its place
Thank you Dave Raggett
\dot? Isn't that the pro-Windows/DOS site where everyone complains endlessly about Linu$ the Locutus, they all say that Gnome shell and Ubuntu Unity are improvements because they comes closer to Windows 8's superior interface, they complain that piracy is undermining creativity, they say that DRM's are the way of the future, and everyone wears a goatee.
I'd like to "like" this story.
http://slashdot.org/submission...
In case someone missed it, FB admitted a month ago that teens are leaving in droves. Their belief however, is those users will come back when they age to re-connect with lost friends and family. Big words from a company that that has yet to exist through even 1 partial generation. My 17 year old daughter says – and I quote – “nobody uses facebook but old people and ghetto kids”. As far as using FB as a login verification, I doubt it. I refuse to use it and won’t post to sites that require FB log in. I detest their cannibalizing everything I do online for marketing and profitability.
Nice try Facebook marketing team!