The most recent iteration of the “Facebook is dead” conversation came with a study out of Princeton University a few weeks ago that claimed that Facebook will loose 80% of its users in the next few years.
The study has its problems, for starters it limits “Facebook” to “Facebook” and does not expand to the rest of the Facebook ecosystem including Instagram which is growing and other problems that are walked through is detail here.
Those issues aside, the study relies on the idea of “virility” that social networks spread like a virus and that people recover and leave the network. Relying on virility is not a flaw, we use the term “viral” online all the time to describe how content spreads. The problem might be that the authors of the study relied too much on the idea of virility.
With the spread of networks, we examine network effects, Metcalfe’s law (the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2), and lock-in to describe how users become tied to a network. The idea of using infectious disease is both new and interesting, and not entirely unrealistic considering that the term “viral” is in such common use online.
Despite its problems the study’s author’s do at least one thing right. They point to MySpace as a comparison for the rise and anticipated fall of Facebook (despite what David Meyer writes in GigaOm) because there is no other point of comparison. MySpace is, aside from Facebook the most dominant social network of its own time. Like all social networks, before it and many since, it fell from its dominant position.
Any study, like the one the Princeton researchers undertook requires a point of comparisons and MySpace is the only one available.
I can guess I can say that I am “cured” of Facebook, other than for work (which is on work pages, not my personal profile) I have not posted in years, have not changed my profile picture since sophomore year of college, and have not read a newsfeed in years. The answer to the obvious question (why?) is equally obvious: I no longer derive value from the service. It became a place of useless articles, pointless pictures and stupid shares.