
Facebook may lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers - adrienm
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease
======
swombat
So the argument is:

\- Facebook's growth curve looks like that of an infectious disease

and

\- "Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between
people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with
epidemiological models,"

therefore

\- Facebook will die out as per the epidemiological model.

Allow me to respond to that in a manner appropriate to the level of
rigorousness of the argument:

Bullshit. Shoddy analogy at best, wilfully stupid attention whoring at worst.

~~~
ronaldx
Why do you believe this analogy will not apply to Facebook?

Social media is called 'viral' for a reason: because its spread is apparently
analogous to infectious disease. This analogy certainly does seem to apply to
other memes and social networks of the past - why would Facebook be an
exception?

~~~
jarrett
The argument isn't that it _won 't_ apply to Facebook. Rather, the assertion
that the analogy _will_ apply is unscientific. It is an assertion of the form:
A and B have behaved the same so far. Thus, A and B are of the same nature,
and will continue to behave the same indefinitely--an improperly drawn
conclusion

"Viral" is just a word. The fact that we have repurposed it to refer to
electronic media does not magically impart to electronic media the properties
of biological viruses.

~~~
ronaldx
The conclusive headline (use of the word _will_ ) is the Guardian's editorial
decision, not used by the scientists, if that's the main objection.

The article has a more measured statement: "Extrapolating the best fit model
into the future suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the
coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."

Observing common network effects and using it to make predictions seems like
valid scienfitic research to me. The hypothesis may or may not be correct, but
it's a (very) testable and falsifiable hypothesis. The science is good.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf)

 _Edited to add_ \- jarrett: I accept your point that the research could be
more thorough; it's a shame only Myspace data appears to have been used.
However, I think this is a valid thread of research and the word 'bullshit'
was unwarranted.

~~~
jarrett
Yes, it is a testable and falsifiable hypothesis. So is "George Washington
will be elected President in 2016." Nonetheless, we can fairly argue that both
hypotheses lack a firm grounding in the evidence.

> Observing common network effects and using it to make predictions seems like
> valid scienfitic research to me.

It's valid I suppose, but purely speculative at this point. It would be much
more meaningful if a study demonstrated that social networks _almost always_
behave like viruses in both their growth and decline, than to simply observe a
similarity and growth and extrapolate the decline.

~~~
asdasf
>Nonetheless, we can fairly argue that both hypotheses lack a firm grounding
in the evidence.

Then make that argument. Because just saying "I don't like it" over and over
is not making any such argument.

~~~
jarrett
Which of the above posts is "just saying 'I don't like it' over and over?"
This thread is a discussion of the structure of a certain argument. To recap:

swombat3 explains why he thinks Princeton's method of reasoning by analogy is
flawed. ronaldx disagrees, asking why the analogy wouldn't be applicable. I
reply that, in my view, ronaldx has disagreed with a different point than the
one swombat3 made. ronaldx replies in defense of Princeton's claims, citing
the testability and falsifiability of the hypothesis. I reply that there is
little evidence for the hypothesis, despite its testability and
falsifiability.

So, all participants have advanced specific, well-articulated arguments
throughout. I don't see anything similar to "I don't like it."

Humorously, this discussion has become rather meta by now. We're now arguing
about the form of argumentation used in a discussion that was itself about
forms of argumentation. It's like we're living out an LSAT question. I find
that sort of conversation hard to resist, so I suppose I'm just rising to the
bait.

~~~
pessimizer
>swombat3 explains why he thinks Princeton's method of reasoning by analogy is
flawed. ronaldx disagrees, asking why the analogy wouldn't be applicable. I
reply that, in my view, ronaldx has disagreed with a different point than the
one swombat3 made. ronaldx replies in defense of Princeton's claims, citing
the testability and falsifiability of the hypothesis. I reply that there is
little evidence for the hypothesis, despite its testability and
falsifiability.

There's not an argument in this entire paragraph. Is it meant to be a list of
pointers to arguments?

Neither "X is(n't) flawed," "X is(n't) applicable," nor "X has (very
little/lots of) evidence" is an argument.

An argument for falsifiability is an argument that the statement of a
particular belief has content and is not just a trick of language, but can't
be said to be an argument for or against that particular belief.

~~~
jarrett
> There's not an argument in this entire paragraph. Is it meant to be a list
> of pointers to arguments?

As stated, it's a recap, or summary, of arguments previously made. So no, the
arguments themselves are not contained or fully expressed in the summary. In
this sense you're correct that it's a list of pointers to arguments--arguments
which can be readily located earlier in the same thread.

> Neither "X is(n't) flawed," "X is(n't) applicable," nor "X has (very
> little/lots of) evidence" is an argument.

Correct. Those are conclusions. The arguments presented in support of those
conclusions are available earlier in the thread.

> An argument for falsifiability is an argument that the statement of a
> particular belief has content and is not just a trick of language, but can't
> be said to be an argument for or against that particular belief.

Agreed. That's why I said the falsifiability of Princeton's hypothesis was not
an argument for the _likelihood_ of that hypothesis. I think we're on the same
page about this.

------
bhouston
There are so many people that are saying this can't happen for a variety of
reasons, at least that is the common reaction I am seeing. I think this type
of denial is misplaced.

That search traffic trend (assuming it is accurate and not some type of bug)
is very worrisome, incredibly worrisome.

I did a comparison of Facebook, Yahoo and Google search trends in Google
Trends. Neither Yahoo or Google saw the same type of decreases, and Google has
tons of mobile accesses too, especially since it is built into the UI of
Android phones, no need to search for Google.

[http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?hl=en-
US&q=/m/02y1vz,+/m...](http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?hl=en-
US&q=/m/02y1vz,+/m/045c7b,+/m/019rl6&cmpt=q&content=1)

I don't think one needs to use a fancy disease model parallel in order to
predict doom for Facebook, you just need to look at those search traffic
trends.

I think this article is generally right in the broad strokes if something
doesn't change -- can there be a Facebook game changer here?

~~~
chaz
Navigational searches on Google from users going to Facebook are being
displaced by direct access to the FB app on their smartphones, which is not
measured in Google Trends.

That, and the assumption that FB is equivalent to MySpace circa 2006, make me
completely dismiss their claim.

~~~
bhouston
That is why I did the comparison with Google, Google is built into the UI of
Android and it is also integrated into the Omnibar of Chrome (or whatever it
is called) so there is also a displacement of search traffic too on Google,
but it didn't see those declines. Now this isn't a perfect control, but it is
something...

~~~
chaz
FB habits are very different from Google or Yahoo. Last earnings call, FB said
that half of their daily users are mobile _only_. About 25% of Google searches
are mobile.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/30/nearly-half-48-of-daily-
use...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/30/nearly-half-48-of-daily-users-of-
facebook-are-now-mobile-only-says-ceo-zuckerberg/)
[http://www.businessinsider.com/mobile-sends-a-quarter-of-
sea...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mobile-sends-a-quarter-of-search-
traffic-2013-7)

------
ChuckMcM
The thing about infectious diseases (the model they are using) are that the
virii just die and that's that. What is not clear is where 80% of Facebook's
users would _be_ in 2017. Google+ ? Somehow I don't think so. This would be
much more compelling for me if there was some Facebook alternative that was
growing rapidly in the 14 - 24 demographic but the Princeton guys don't
mention one, and I've not come across it yet. Its hard for me to believe that
80% of Facebook's users will stop using it and go back to no equivalent.

~~~
ForHackernews
> Its hard for me to believe that 80% of Facebook's users will stop using it
> and go back to no equivalent.

Really? Why? Who's to say that "social media" (at least in the sense of a
unified platform with a real name) wasn't a fad?

Plenty of people are moving to a more fragmented internet life, with personal
messages on Snapchat, photos on Pinterest, discussion on Reddit, etc.

~~~
dictum
Case in point: in the 1990s, portals were _big_ , and every popular website
wanted to be a portal. Likewise, between 2006 and now, most popular websites
integrate social features.

What people seek in Facebook, they'll start finding in more directed services.
Facebook was made for a world where smartphones and affordable or free fast
mobile internet access was rare. A shrunk version of the regular web version
can be enough for adults who are already used to Facebook, but teenagers and
children will flock to user experiences that explore the advantages and
idiosyncrasies of smartphones.

Maybe Facebook the company will own some of these new services and interface
ideas, but Facebook the old timeline/friends/profile service will get obscured
by the new, shiny, more intimate new services.

~~~
southpawgirl
Agree! Indeed, the comparaison with portals springs to the mind. While the
amount of items (links, people, services, cultural niches) available
increases, the need for more specialised and fragmented avenues of consumption
increases. It's not difficult to imagine a scenario when one can pick and mix
completely their online experience and still find their their social
connections across different platforms, with the use of some meta tool, like
an OpenId that also exposes the patterns of activities of one's friends.

As a purely empirical, nonrepresentative sample, I can see that most of my
friends on Facebook are fairly quiet nowadays and my own account is virtually
dead. It's still quite useful to have a FB a/c in order to authenticate on
other apps; maybe FB will transforms itself into the aforementioned meta-
tool...? Until it's superseded by a more specialised one...

------
bwood
For such a bold claim, I'm not really impressed with the model. Basically, the
authors take the well-known SIR model [1] (susceptible -> infectious ->
removed) for simple modeling of infectious diseases and modify its removal
term to be infectious as well (rather than the infected population just
decaying exponentially).

The big problem I have with their model is that the population flow is still
one-directional, so ANY infection modeled with these equations will eventually
go to zero. There is no term in the equations to account for social adhesion
that would prevent people from leaving, and there is no pressure for people
who have left Facebook to join again. The authors have validated their model
by curve-fitting it against MySpace's decline after the fact, so there's no
real prediction here.

It's an interesting model, but take any predictions based on it with a grain
of salt.

For anyone interested in reading on similar subjects, here's a paper I co-
wrote in which we incorporate a reinfection term into the SIR model and use it
to model viral memes [2,3].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SIR_model)

[2]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0307904X11...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0307904X11002824)

[3]
[http://stash.synchroverge.com/files/viral_memetic_model.pdf](http://stash.synchroverge.com/files/viral_memetic_model.pdf)

------
md224
Looks like this thread was killed by the flamewar detector and then
resurrected? Or was it flagged? It troubles me when conversations on HN are
just "disappeared" like that.

For those who didn't notice: this article disappeared from the front page, and
another related submission
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105451))
eventually rose to the front page, where I commented that this was strange and
linked to my post on the matter
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105414)).
The newer submission was then killed and this article was resurrected. My post
was also briefly killed, though it was brought back with a reduced rank. Not
sure what happened, but it's all a bit confusing.

------
gus_massa
Previous discussion from a different report of the same new:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904)
(19 points, 3 hours ago, 18 comments)

The first comment is long and interesting: “ _Um, folks, this is a non-peer
reviewed paper written by some Princeton students. [...]_ ”
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7103987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7103987)

------
ThomPete
Facebook is way more integrated into everything than MySpace ever was. This is
not just a post pictures and sell music kind of place (although it certainly
is a big part), this is everything from hardcore socialresearch platform to
businesses making their entire living off the platform to entertainment and so
on.

The thing with Facebook is that it's not for the youngest people anymore it's
for those who used to be young (+25)

And so naturally kids aged 17 doesn't want to be were their parents and older
siblings are hanging out. That does not mean that FB those on FB right now
will drop out if anything I think it will grow.

~~~
buckbova
I think it's dead man walking, especially with an unsustainable revenue base.

~~~
ThomPete
Care to elaborate?

~~~
VLM
their price implying they'll have 150% of all advertising dollars spent in any
form. Or something roughly like that.

Doesn't mean its dropping to zero, just astoundingly overvalued.

------
tokenadult
There seems to be a call here for a better-quality top comment. I may not
succeed in providing one, but I will try. [Pauses to finish reading article.]

"John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and
aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of
times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term."

That's a convenient methodology, but of course it's a methodology that cannot
be applied to anything before the availability of Google search data, so it
doesn't even provide a model for explaining why Google supplanted AltaVista.
(Hint: even at its healthiest, I don't think most users of AltaVista found
AltaVista by doing a Google search first.)

"They tested various equations against the lifespan of Myspace, before
applying them to Facebook."

Myspace, of course, is the classic example of a social networking site that
once looked unstoppable, until it pretty much died. But data-fitting to just
one data set is probably not enough model testing for making a prediction
about a different social networking site.

"But Facebook's chief financial officer David Ebersman admitted on an earnings
call with analysts that during the previous three months: 'We did see a
decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens.'"

Now we're talking about some meaningful data that actually pertains directly
to Facebook. If Facebook corporate officers are concerned about a trend, maybe
that trend is really meaningful to Facebook's business prospects.

"Investors do not appear to be heading for the exit just yet. Facebook's share
price reached record highs this month, valuing founder Mark Zuckerberg's
company at $142bn."

Well, that's the nub of the issue for anyone who buys shares of Facebook
stock. If it still looks like holding Facebook stock allows a profitable exit,
maybe there is nothing to worry about here (at least for investors).

The article engages in further speculation about Facebook making a lot of
money in the future. That could happen. My prediction about Facebook stands:
"Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years
from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never
monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it. I used to see friends on
AOL. I never felt an obligation to help AOL monetize just because of that.
Networks are a dime a dozen. Right now, Facebook is a very convenient network,
and I like it. I do not predict that Facebook will make a lot of money because
of users like me."

I could be proven wrong, but that's what I think the future of Facebook holds.
I admit my methodology is just about entirely drawing an analogy with AOL,
which I used a lot back in the day.

~~~
ctdonath
_data-fitting to just one data set is probably not enough model testing for
making a prediction about a different social networking site._

I've watched the lifecycles of a LOT of social sites, from the beginning days
of BBSs. Lots of "but _this_ one is _different_ " sites. They have _all_ gone
thru pretty much the same lifecycle ending in stagnation & abandonment around
7 years after starting. Some of them (CompuServe, AOL, MySpace, others which
were just as big and even more forgotten) took the social tech world by storm,
were poised to take over the world, and garnered lots of investment because
they were so darned unstoppable. Most users got bored and moved on. Like
Zaphod Beeblebrox, they're dead - they just haven't stopped moving yet. ALL OF
THEM.

And Facebook shows absolutely no meaningful differentiation from that pattern.

(I want to say "now get off my lawn", but many may miss the intended humor.)

~~~
pr0zac
Well Facebook is 10 years old next month and still growing. Thats a pretty
meaningful differentiation from the pattern.

~~~
cloudwizard
All the other social networks were growing right up until they didn't. They
had a similar percentage of the online world.

~~~
albedoa
Right, and Facebook will continue to grow until it doesn't, but that wasn't
the point he was responding to:

> And Facebook shows absolutely no meaningful differentiation from that
> pattern.

The implication of this claim is that 10 years and growing is not meaningfully
different from 7 years and stagnant.

------
scelerat
Speaking only anecdotally, I notice that up until a few years ago, it was
common among my friends and acquaintances to _join_ Facebook. Now the trend
seems to be to _leave_ Facebook. Not in great numbers, just here and there,
and more than seem to be signing up.

~~~
Sharlin
Well, there's obviously a saturation point - once almost everyone (in a given
social circle) has joined, there are no more people left to join. At that
point, those who haven't joined probably never will.

------
ghop02
Using an SIR model seems a shady approach for this model. The model inherently
assumes an amount of time where a person is "infectious." They modified the
traditional SIR model, Also, they never allow migration from the Recovered
class to the Susceptible class again, meaning that once a person stops using
Facebook, they will never use it again. It seems to not take into account age
buckets (where Facebook may be more "infectious" with different age groups).

------
prjohnson
Here's the direct link to the Princeton study cited in the article:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf)

------
LocalPCGuy
One thing I don't see mentioned but once or twice is that one of the reasons
the model fits MySpace is BECAUSE Facebook came around and offered a better
model. Where is the better model that people are going to be leaving Facebook
for? Google+? Maybe, but unlikely.

I don't buy that people are going to quit using social media, or that it is a
fad. I am looking for that thing that will displace Facebook, or disrupt their
network effect, but right now, I don't see anything that would work for the
2-5 year projection they make in the paper. Still possible for something to
pop up, of course, but haven't seen the potential replacement for Facebook
yet.

~~~
mbillie1
> One thing I don't see mentioned but once or twice is that one of the reasons
> the model fits MySpace is BECAUSE Facebook came around and offered a better
> model.

Salient point. I can't name another popular one among older-than-teens in the
same vein (twitter I feel is a different sort of thing), and while I sometimes
don't really understand why I continue to use facebook, I definitely continue
to use it.

------
nrao123
Separately from the disease analogy, Facebook could exhibit reverse network
effects on the way down. Brad Burnham & Fred Wilson have also talked about
reverse network effects.

Here is a link from Fred talking about Single User Utility in a Network:
[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-
soc...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-
system.html)

\---

And, as I have said before, network effects help on the way up and hurt on the
way down. If I get great single person utility from your service, it is less
likely that I will follow my friends out of it when your service ends its stay
on the hype cycle and the iTunes leaderboard

\---

Here are some background reading from the Social Network Researcher Danah
Boyd:

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_27/b42350539...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570.htm)

\--- Social networks appear to be a very peculiar business—one in which
companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear.

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher who studies social networks at Microsoft
Research, attributes their instability to the way users can bind themselves by
race and class, taste and aesthetics. Influential peers pull others in on the
climb up—and signal to flee when it’s time to get out. “The thing about user
adoption and user departure is that it’s not a steady flow,” says Boyd. “Think
of it as, you’re knitting a beautiful scarf, and you’re knitting and knitting,
and you get a bigger and bigger scarf. Then someone pulls a loose thread at
the bottom. And it all unravels….

“Facebook did a fantastic job of hiding behind the panic around Myspace and
basically saying, ‘We’re totally safe,’ ” says Boyd. Myspace’s inability to
build an effective spam filter exacerbated the public impression that it was
seedy. And that, says Boyd, contributed to an exodus of white, middle-class
kids to the supposedly safer haven of Facebook—a movement she compares to the
“white flight” from American cities in the second half of the 20th century.
Myspace was becoming Detroit. \---

~~~
im3w1l
I think another close analogy is fashion.

------
smackfu
"The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could
explain the drop in Google searches – those looking to log on are no longer
doing so by typing the word Facebook into Google."

You think???

------
higherpurpose
I believe it. Facebook doesn't have anything going for it at this point other
than the fact that everyone is on it. The problem is that it's becoming
increasingly less interesting, to the point where it will be no more
interesting than the Yellow Pages - everyone is in there, but nobody cares
about opening it up anymore, except for once a year perhaps. At that point
Facebook is dead, and it doesn't matter if people actually press that non-
delete Delete button, or they stop logging in to it.

~~~
alkonaut
> Facebook doesn't have anything going for it at this point other than the
> fact that everyone is on it.

Which is pretty huge. Even if I never shared anything and never casually
browsed facebook, I still would not stop using it quite regularly, say a few
times per week, for things like event planning, direct messaging people (Who
keeps a list of friends' email addresses?).

So the question then becomes: if facebook is slowly turned into a contact book
and event planner, does that mean the end of facebook? Does facebook require
billions of people hitting millions of like buttons and farming animals on
their walls in order to live?

~~~
Zimahl
> So the question then becomes: if facebook is slowly turned into a contact
> book and event planner, does that mean the end of facebook? Does facebook
> require billions of people hitting millions of like buttons and farming
> animals on their walls in order to live?

It depends what you mean by 'end' but if this is all people do once there in
the future, absolutely. There won't be enough daily active users to support
advertising, which leads to a downward spiral. People may keep their accounts
but Facebook's data (like any social network) is highly temporal - once you
stop liking stuff they become more and more out of touch with ad targeting.

~~~
alkonaut
Exactly, but the reduced revenue is likely proportional to reduced operating
costs. It will be the white-dwarf end of Facebook, but it would never die
until someone creates a feasible replacement. Even at a fraction of its
current size, being "just" everyone's contact book for one billion users is
still quite a big deal.

So it's a definition of when Facebook is "dead" or "gone". It will never go
away entirely.

------
sbirksted
Thinking about it, Facebook has a few things going for it. It's become an
important communication channel outside of immediate family and Best friends.
Collecting email addresses across multiple web mail accounts, that's a chore.
Facebook has made messaging people easy. That convenience has got staying
power, especially as in regards to mobile communication.

Teens aren't interested in Facebook anymore? Doesn't matter, they have no
money to spend.

The sweet spot is advertising to older people with jobs.

The balance they need to find is the amount of directed advertising they can
force on a user, without making them abandon FB... or just use it strictly as
a messaging tool.

Scare off users from reading/liking/posting items in their feed, lose the
other revenue stream: mining and selling social trend data.

~~~
kfcm

       Teens aren't interested in Facebook anymore? Doesn't matter, they have no money to spend.
    

Sure they do. They spend their parents' money quite well. Being only half-way
facetious. It's what they spend it on. Newest gadgets. Clothes. Entertainment
(iTunes or streaming music/tv shows/movies).

------
scelerat
Facebook's appeal is largely casual entertainment. I say largely because there
are some very practical features in the platform, like photo sharing and event
planning/invitation. But it seems to me the bulk of its use is simply sharing
links and anecdotes. Once the novelty of the medium wears off, people will
look for the next entertaining fix.

I'm not sure how different it is from massively popular TV series of decades
past, such as MASH or Dallas, where millions of people tuned in every week to
see what would happen next. Eventually, all series die out. In the case of
network TV, the medium itself, "what happened next" was cable TV, and then the
internet.

I don't doubt it will be the same for Facebook (the product, not the company).

~~~
gms7777
> Facebook's appeal is largely casual entertainment.

I don't know if that's truly accurate, at least among my crowd (a few years
out of undergrad, who mostly joined Facebook in late high school).

The use of facebook for casual entertainment has largely faded. It was new and
novel once, and now there are so many other forms of entertainment out there
that for that purpose we could drop facebook in a second.

We (specifically my friends, I don't want to generalize to everyone in my
demographic) use it because its a centralized way to stay connected. For the
most part, my high school friends scattered all over the country when we
graduated high school, and then my college friends did the same thing.
Facebook's prime utility at this point is that we want to keep up to date on
what those people are doing, and so far, everyone is still there. I'm not sure
if there is something that can come along that take over that same role for
us. Now we may grow up and stop caring about that sort of stuff, but I think
it will take more than a few years.

~~~
mbillie1
> a centralized way to stay connected

This is what FB has pushed all along iirc, or at least it's the argument I've
always heard, and only recently (I'm 31) have I noticed that this is really
what I use it for. It's fun to see pictures from a friend's vacation in
Vietnam, or to read that so-and-so-who-I-like-but-not-enough-to-regularly-call
got a new job or got married or something. It's bizarre, but

> Now we may grow up and stop caring about that sort of stuff, but I think it
> will take more than a few years.

...I only seem to care more over time, which is weird. I shouldn't discount
making-more-interesting-and-smart-friends and the 'unfollow'-or-'hide all from
foo on my newsfeed' features though.

------
this_user
That paper basically extrapolates Facebook's future from one data point (the
rise and fall of MySpace). I'd be more inclined to believe them if they
analysed the life cycles of more than other social network, but this way their
results are more than questionable.

------
blisterpeanuts
When something better comes along to replace or supplement it, Facebook use
will undoubtedly level off or decline. Until then, I doubt it will decline
much if at all.

It's gradually replacing all the independent communities with convenient
Facebook communities and user groups, it's a convenient one-stop site for
communicating with friends, sharing pics and generally relaxing at the water
cooler.

Teens of course will always look for some alternative (WhatsApp, Reddit, etc)
so as not to appear to conform to their parents' generation, but in reality
there is no particularly great alternative that offers everything FB offers,
especially in terms of sheer numbers of participants.

------
adiM
As someone who joined the Internet bandwagon relatively late (circa 2000),
whenever I see such reports on /viral growth/ of social website I wonder if
email and usenet had a similar /viral growth/ in the 90s. Although the number
of Internet users back then were small compared to now, they were still large
enough in absolute numbers for some of these statistical analogies to apply.
Usenet did eventually die out (for all practical purposes), but email is still
going strong (perhaps not as much as at its peak, but it is nowhere close to
being dead either).

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lowglow
I love using facebook. It's great for connecting with friends and discovering
my network. I post most of what I do there and twitter.

 _that being said_ I'm constantly looking for something new. It seems facebook
has hit a wall in its cutting edge delivery of products and services. Is this
a product of their IPO? I'm not sure how internally they've changed, but
whatever happened, it seems to have changed how quickly the product has
evolved externally.

Good luck to them though, staying #1 is difficult and requires an agile
thought process.

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timedoctor
Facebook is used by different people for many different purposes.

In Ukraine right now it is the default news channel for the opposition with
the mass protests going on now, and has served a similar function in other
countries.

For some people it's a way to stay in touch with close friends.

For others it's a way to occasionally keep in touch with more distant friends.

Others use it as a contact/ address book.

Others use it for games.

I don't think it's going to die out, instead it's going to evolve.

I also do think it's possible it might die out, but way too early to know what
will happen.

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drdeadringer
After reading several articles about FB loosing teenagers because of "grandma
knows FB" and "I prefer chats now", none of the grandma-age folks at my
church, the population majority there, believe the news that FB is less of the
future for communicating with the "younger generations" [because recruitment
for sustainability is important].

I've stopped minding though; I no longer have a FB account, and at this point
I'd prefer people learn by their mistakes.

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hoopism
What?

The link is to a UK google trends page and doesn't seem to work. Basically it
peaks right at the IPO time and has tailed back to the pre-ipo trend. Wouldn't
call it a decline.

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook&cmpt=q](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook&cmpt=q)

That appears to be the only referenced proof in the article (a google trends
chart).

~~~
pessimizer
The pre-ipo trend at best looks flat, but really looks like it was declining.
Facebook's emergence as an investment might actually be masking a decline in
searches from people who are not investors.

~~~
hoopism
Click the "forecast" button. Google disagrees.

~~~
pessimizer
Google, in this case, is a blind algorithm guessing at the continuation of a
line. It knows nothing of IPOs.

~~~
hoopism
Yes. Google does not take into account "viral" jumps in it's prediction
algorithm for long term search popularity... they just simply "extend the
line". Makes perfect sense. I forgot Google was run by middle school
engineers.

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ExpendableGuy
It's easy to say now that this mass Myspace migration happened, but its
downfall was much more than Facebook showing up. e.g., It had a ton of
technical issues, and it got really ugly / unwieldy.

If you're interested, the book "The Facebook Effect" does a good job
describing the fall of Myspace.

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webwanderings
Facebook won't be going anywhere, just like Yahoo never did. Facebook Groups
has way too many people locked in on daily basis. These are same people who
are hooked on email and email lists.

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gkoberger
I think this is more indicative that most people use Facebook mobile. I
understand Googling it from a desktop browser, but most people access FB by
clicking the F icon on their smart phone.

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pistle
This is just the setup. They are actually modelling linkbait headlines to
build a data set for a thesis on optimization of online marketing buys. You
are the punchline.

That, or this is just bad science.

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jobeirne
I'll place a $100 bet against this claim. Any takers?

~~~
nirajd
$FB

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thematt
Translation: short the stock

~~~
cbr
Translation: buy the stock.

(They would like to bet against the claim that Facebook will lose most of
their users. That's a bet on Facebook's long-term value, and maps to buying
their stock.)

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contacternst
Step 1: Make totally ridiculous claims about social giant

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit

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RuCrazy
Facebook sucks and it shall perish! It just plain sucks!

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ffrryuu
Facebook is pretty dead traffic wise already...

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elwell
Then how will people log into my app?

/s

