“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.” That’s according to a pair of Princeton University researchers who liken Facebook adoption to an infection. Those who don’t join the social media platform are immunized, they say; those who leave Facebook are experiencing recovery.
If it sounds like junk science, it isn’t. Though I do think the researchers, despite their best efforts to use virus spread models to analyze the growth, adoption and decline of social networks, got pretty much everything wrong. Read more…