Here’s a status that Facebook might not like. While it seems Facebook right now is seeing a spike in usage during it’s 10 year anniversary celebrations, US researchers from Princeton University have made a great claim – this is the spike before the decline, much like an infectious disease.
This may be shocking considering how most of us would still get a thousand Candy Crush requests from Grandma a day but with current statistics in mind it is estimated that 80 percent of users by 2017 will be gone.
Responsible for these claims are two doctoral candidates in mechanical and aerospace engineering, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, who used the rise and fall of MySpace as a basis. The findings are simple to understand: Ideas, much like diseases, make a spread infectiously (and with trend) between people before eventually dying out or being wiped out.
They even presented a modified epidemiological model to show the trend and personalities of user activities using publicly available Google aggregated data.
This is not good news for the decade strong social network giant, losing 80% of their 1.1 billion user base around the world in an estimated time frame of 3 years from the posting of this article.
But it seems the writing is on the wall (or should I say timeline?) and the study shows that data usage since 2012 has been in a great decline and eventually shrinking to 20 percent of its capacity size by December 2014. Yes, this December.
It makes you wonder what they plan to do with their new US$19,000,000,000 (nineteen billion) purchase of WhatsApp which has a user base far fewer than their own.
For now, we can only hold out for December to see how far off their first estimation is.