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Facebook Mocks 'Infection' Study, Predicts Princeton's Demise
Okian Warrior writes "In a followup to the earlier story about Princeton researchers predicting the end of Facebook by 2017, Facebook has struck back with a post using similar statistical techniques to predict that Princeton itself may be facing irreversible decline. By using similar methods ('likes', mentions in scholarly papers, Google searches) Facebook has created graphs that indicate Princeton is losing ground compared with its rivals and may have no students at all by 2021."
Princeton will have the last laugh as facebook will be dead before it.
Turn about is fair play sir!
Offers good value for the time and money you spend there.
The best part of Facebook's article is where they use identical research methodology to prove that there will be no air left by 2060.
I predict an immediate rush on all stockpiles of canned air!
You can make numbers look however you like in a study, who knew?
5 bucks on the skilly pasty white boy!
I mean, what would we do as a society if we lost Facebook and thus the ability to keep tabs on people we haven't spoken to since high school?
Offers good value for the time and money you spend there.
You wouldn't know it from the idiocies exposed in the Facebook paper.
Okay, that's not what I was expecting to see this morning. Or ever, come to think about it.
I guess it's good to know that I can respect a well-crafted response, even when it comes from a source I don't respect.
10 : 1 that Princeton wins. Bookie can be contacted over my email .
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Funny how quick they replied to this study, feeling a bit nervous facebook?
This is a brilliant way to respond to the Princeton study - the correct way - rather than issue a press release denouncing it, or whine about it some other way.
Instead, use the study's own methodology against them to show other ridiculous conclusions. What are the academics at Princeton going to do, say "oh wait the original methods are bullshit". Anything they say against just weakens their original paper/study.
While I can certainly see Facebook fading away, the problem with the Princeton study is that an essential assumption was that since Facebook is the successor to Myspace the data regarding Myspace's rise and fall can be extrapolated to Facebook (using the resemblance of Myspace's rise and fall to certain other phenomena). The problem with this assumption is that Myspace's fall was a result of Facebook existing as its successor. Currently there is no "successor" to Facebook which fills the same niche as Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster filled.
I am not arguing that Facebook will not fall in the same way that Myspace did. I am just arguing that we do not have the data to make the case. Accurately predicting the fall of Facebook is a matter of "art", not of science and most of those doing so are expressing an opinion based on a WAG (and perhaps on what they hope will happen). Myspace and Friendster were fads. Facebook started as a fad, Myspace and Friendster faded away when they lost their novelty and were replaced by the next fad. However, Facebook has survived past the fad stage. I will repeat that just because Facebook has survived past the fad stage that does not mean that it will last.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
What i would like to know is what separates Facebook from AOL, Myspace, AIM, ICQ, BBS etc that came and went.
Unless someone can pinpoint something different with Facebook, its history will follow every other similar service since the dawn of the BBS. Something better / more popular will come and take the users away.
The difference is that Princeton hasn't seen major declines (in the millions) of its primary demographic group. FB is funded both directly and indirectly by advertising/marketers. If the demographic for FB shifts elsewhere, so will the revenue stream. Princeton's funding is more diverse coming from tuition/fees, grants and contributions/bequests. Unless there is a scandal, it is unlikely that those sources will change.
In addition, the competition of universities is pretty fixed. It is extremely expensive to start a new one (and get accredited). FB, on the other hand, well, it wasn't too long ago that Myspace was the king of the hill and FB was the challenger.
Facebook has used the same techniques as Princeton, and as such we can conclude that they approve of these techniques, and find them useful analytical instruments.
The only conclusion we can draw from this is the demise of both Princeton and Facebook.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Is it Perri-Air?
Fuck Facebook.
http://xkcd.com/605/
Only extrapolate in the opposite direction.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Facebook's reply was even really stupid.
Princenton article proposed a 'virus' model that fitted pretty well to Facebook growth and current decline, and made a prediction based on that, ignoring some social parameters, and made a prediction.
Facebook's article is just extrapolating, and not being a virtual entity, the virtual presence of Princenton might not be an equally good indicator.
Why not Zoidberg?
The difference being that one is proud if their grandfather went to Princeton and horrified if their grandfather is friending them on Facebook.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Assuming an even distribution of Americas most powerful anti-Semites across the US and across US universities, that conclusion is logically correct.
bickerdyke
Princeton has a longer history of being resilient and adapting to changing times.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There is no way in hell they're going to lose 500 million users by 2017, hell not even NSA could accomplish that.
It's just a matter of when. Perhaps long after I die, perhaps even later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Facebook will be a Somalian-owned brand of cheap electronics.
Screw Facebook. All they do is kill the minds of the current generation. Facebook should die an an entity.
Too bad I didn't see the link.
You see, I've added *.facebook.com and *.fbcdn.com to my AdBlock. It makes web surfing so much better!
I'm currently weighing the the value of staying with the site. I've decided to not use it for 30 days and evaluate whether I'm interested in staying at the end. On the one hand, I see the content as vain, repetitive, and uninteresting. On the other, without facebook I would lose contact with a lot of people permanently, old friends, cousins, etc. Some on /. will say just use email to keep contact. For one thing, I don't have proper email addresses for every facebook friend and it could be awkward to ask for them. It's also nice that being aware of the goings on with some people's lives is mostly passive and voyeuristic on facebook.
I think I could happily move on from FB without knowing what's going on in the lives of people I will likely never see again in person. The one thing that is nagging me though is the option to throw out beacons and organizing for help when necessary. For example, my brother broke his arm skiing on a trip to utah. He needed some help getting picked up from the airport and someone to help him with his bags. He sent out a message on facebook, and an old friend he hasn't seen in years volunteered. That's useful, and he would never have made that connection without FB.
for all intensive purposes.
Facebook is more integrated into the rest of the web than all those other things.
None of the things you just mentioned, had millions of other sites embedding "like buttons" which give free intelligence to them whenever someone loads that other site's pages. Facebook, Google [Analytics], AddThis, and a few other things (Comscore and Quantcast) do something sort of similar (but at greater cost to themselves). I don't remember seeing AOL/MySpace/AIM/ICQ play that game. Go ahead, tell me what script or iframe tag MySpace (or AOL, ha!) ever got some other site to serve to all their users.
AOL and MySpace never (AFAIK) ran an OpenID server, or if they did, they convinced hardly anyone to use it. Facebook did that, except went a step further and did their own protocol instead of OpenID, and lots of sites use it. Look at the "sign in with" part of this page and tell me you see AOL or MySpace. The four (and only four) companies you see there, fucked the users by deviating from standards, and as their reward they get an explicit mention/branding instead of a generic enter-your-openid-URL blank. (If this ain't proof that Evil Is Basically A Good Idea, then I don't know what is. But that's beside the point.)
Do you remember ever seeing other sites show free ads to users, for MySpace or AOL, and where the webmasters thought it was basically a good/sane idea in their self interest? I can think of lots of sites I visit, where that site says "follow us on Facebook" complete with a link to Facebook. Facebook pays $0.00000000 CPM for this ad. It's a dumb ad too, since if you follow the link, you just see a scaled down abbreviated version of that site's own content and links back to that site. (Well, that plus some additional ads that Facebook got paid to run -- and where some of those ads, might even be for competitors to site you came from!)
If in 1997 you told you something like that could possibly exist, I would have laughed in your face. I still do laugh in your face in 2014 over the same thing, but it's a laugh of madness, drowned in the cacophony of a world gone mad.
Facebook is a bad site (there's no reason you should ever point your browser there), but on the other hand, they were brilliantly clever compared to all that came before them, in terms of getting value out of other sites. When Site X becomes the next big thing, there's a reasonably good chance that every pageload they acquire, will also help Facebook a little. Can you say MySpace was ever in such a position? Ever heard of dialup BBS that gained free data, sent from the user's computer, whenever a user picked any menu option on any of a few million other BBSes? Did you ever go to any site, where if you had firewalled off ICQ's servers, that other unrelated site wasn't able to offer all its usual interactivity?
Facebook is a totally different beast than MySpace, with basically nothing in common with it. MySpace was just some website that was popular for a while. Facebook is Shub-Internet.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When you don't like a scholarly article, attack the scholar! Little could more clearly demonstrate a total lack of maturity and foresight on the part of FB execs, which are two key traits they will need to avoid the Princeton prediction.
I think they could care less of ad targeting when the businesses that have pages have to pay to distribute their content to all of their followers. That's the real catch... even though you have 100 000 followers, you posts will only get shown to a fraction of those. Want to show it to all of them without having people "like" the post? Pay up...
Google/YouTube's business model is centered around what you are suggesting.
to get Facebook so riled up.
Whether useful or not, or evil or not, Facebook is a technically solid platform and they have created an ecosystem around its content. Its far far more advanced than MySpace (which I believe was some sort of band-aid using ColdFusion), its like Google compared to Yahoo.
The sophistication of Facebook I see whenever I buy ads on the site...I can pinpoint ads to a narrow user-base, and this will be more on the spot than Google AdWords/AdSense.
Facebook is a decent platform for a group discussion or following a specific topic and so on. I agree 99% of the content is someone's children's stupid photos.
And Facebook is needed to counter Google. Else Google will be the only evil corporation, you need more evil corporations battling each other so that they will leave the proletariat in peace.
Will Facebook die? Probably not as its useful. But it may not be worth the crazy valuations and inflated stock prices.
Tat Tvam Asi
Just look at any communications technology from the early to mid 20th century that was the "cutting edge" of the day but now is the technology dinosaur. For example pony express/snail mail - telegraph - telephone - fax - email - social media. Think it will end? Hardly.
A: Boss.
They may both be right (let's hope)
So true. See also by me from 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... ... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) ... ... ... ...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?
What can PU do down the road to help assure any future similar prospective's parents or guardians that PU helps such students sort through all their dreams and ethics to set priorities, and to help them see what makes sense for a humane world and a happy life, and what does not? What sort of skills can PU help someone like that learn to be an even better collaborator on free projects? As happened with Linus Torvalds in Finland, how can PU help ethics and poetry come together with science and engineering in such a young person's life?
Rather than move books into a new "Lewis Science Library" (as if even just today's usual prospectives would care about that in the internet age with Google Books and so forth accessible from their dorm desktops or from networked laptops anywhere), the building could be renamed the "Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence".
All the books over 20 years old slated to be moved there could be digitized and served to the world, with the originals shipped to an English speaking poor place like New Delhi, India to be given away for free. When Princeton gets sued for this, the alumni lawyers could rally to its defense, either winning in court or changing the copyright laws. Then *all* the books at PU could be digitized, served to the world, and shipped for "disposal" to India, perhaps with notarized copies of original cover pages kept in a vault somewhere as proof of purchase, and the books stamped "intended for disposal; may not be resold, only given away". The URL where the book can be found at princeton.edu should also be stamped onto the inside cover. (Obviously "rare" books might be excepted from being shipped to India, and now there would be a lot more space for more of them.) The space freed in Firestone could be converted to indoor squash courts as well as office and lab space for free projects. When PU gets sued again for making its whole collection available to the public for free, tap into the alumni lawyer network to deal with it, or even tap into the endowment to solve this some way with money which would soon be near worthless anyway as more and more of the economy goes free.
The university could free all the patents and copyrights it controls, as well as make new contracts for faculty, staff, and students, that all published work done using university resources must be freely licensed.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Irregardless of the origins of the phrase, it is perfectly reasonable to say "for all intensive purposes".
This reminds me of something I once saw this written on a wall at Ga Tech:
"God is dead" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead" - God
I do not like, nor use, Facebook, but I can't help enjoying the fact that Princeton, that establishment whose elitist status is often wrongly conflated with academic excellence, has egg on its face for what is a display of major incompetence in what is really high school statistics.
She doesn't look Druish.
send humans running in terror back to direct interaction with other humans.
they can't both be correct.
So, everybody is an advertiser on Facebook. Businesses pay to target you with ads, but users pay to get their posts promoted, and as the video suggests, Facebook manipulates what your followers see so that you are induced to pay Facebook to get attention from your friends.
I have already seen direct evidence that people in my modest circle of friends do not see everything I post, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is actively manipulating that until I saw that video.
How soon can it be before everybody wises up that their regard for their friends on Facebook is shaped by an unseen hand and that relationships are at risk because of it? When that realization becomes the perception that one should not use Facebook to contact family and friends, that it is dangerous to risk relationships on Facebook, the exodus from it will begin. It is a dangerous game that Facebook plays because people change their habits on perceptions and if more and more come to the realization that it is not fair, they will leave. They will leave even sooner if people's News Feed becomes crowded with spam, and Facebook doesn't have very much leeway before that tips. This year they are introducing auto-running video ads. If they don't do this right, they could piss off lots of people and they will leave even sooner. I think that Facebook's position is for Facebook to lose with any number of missteps. I'll go with the Princeton result and as much as the Face Book was originally a paper dossier for dorm life at Harvard and a way to be hung by your own petard. How it is Facebook's turn.
If someone rides a bike in summer and the bus in winter, does that make him rich or not rich?
no one at Princeton knows Greek anymore
I don't understand how Rose-Hulman can get someone from Greece on a student visa but Princeton can't.
That doesn't mean I don't end up remembering a few, like some 4 liters in a gallon.
Especially when a "fifth" of liquor (750 mL) is so called because it's so close to one-fifth of a gallon.