Will Facebook die like how Friendster did? Researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will 80% of its users by 2017 by drawing similarities between its rapid adoption and proliferation.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv.

Researchers argue that using the premise of epidemiological models, it can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks.

They based their models on data reflecting the number of times Facebook has been typed into Google as a search term.

Checking Google Trends reveals that these weekly "search queues" reached a peak in December of 2012, and have since begun to level off.

They used the figures and put it in a SIR model for the spread of infectious disease – the researchers call theirs an "infection recovery," or "irSIR," model – yields the chart at the top of this post, and "suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."



They tested their model comparing Google search query data for "Myspace" against adoption and abandonment curves predicted by traditional and infectious recovery SIR models and found that it matches up rather neatly with the proposed irSIR model.

While it is reasonable to assume that Facebook's position may dip just as the infectious-disease equivalence holds true, it might not play out in the way these models suggest. For example, these models do not take into consideration newer technologies like smartphones and apps where Facebook is being accessed more than ever right now.

Either way, the prediction model does suggest another thought altogether: What will the next big thing be after Facebook?