Researchers from Princeton University in New Jersey have suggested the patterns of social network adoption and their subsequent fall from grace follow those of infectious disease epidemics.
In the Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics paper, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler of the university's Department of Medical and Aerospace Engineering, explained such models had previously been applied to the spread of ideas.
"The application of disease-like dynamics to OSN [online social networks] adoption follows intuitively, since users typically join OSNs because their friends have already joined. Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," they said.
"Again, this follows intuitively, as ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of immunity' to the idea," they added.
Cannarella and Spechler used Google Trends to examine how often people searched for terms such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook using the Google search engine.
Their results show that search volume for Facebook peaked in December 2012 and they go on to predict the social network will be largely abandoned by 2017.
"Given the early stage of Facebook's [search trend] decline at the time of writing, the best fit...model can be used not only to provide an explanation of the observed curve, but also to forecast how the OSN will decline in the future," Cannarella and Spechler said.
"Extrapolating the best fit model into the future suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 per cent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017," they concluded.
