Slashdot Mirror
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
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
"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.
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.
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/...
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.
99.28% of visitors arrive directly at the site, and only 7.7% arrived from Google
But what about the other -6.98% ?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
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...
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.
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
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.