Facebook may lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease

by adrienm • 13 years ago

170 159 13 years ago

ThomPete3• 13 years ago

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.

wozniacki2• 13 years ago

I know that most lawsuits against Facebook for a litany of privacy violations end up going nowhere.[1]

But there just might be a tipping point, soon, when one of these class action lawsuits actually becomes a significant drain on Facebook's resources.

[1] Campbell V Facebook http://www.scribd.com/doc/195351255/Campbell-v-Facebook

buckbova• 13 years ago

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

ThomPete3• 13 years ago

Care to elaborate?

darkmighty• 13 years ago

Some random researches with no solid background on this fit a fairly flexible curve to data and people go mad?

Just looking at simple principles falsifies this: Facebook's older public is quite solidified, there's so much built on top of it, etc. Myspace didn't have to enormous infrastructure or the general social network outlook we currently have. Even by pure inertia it'd say it would take more than 5 years for FB to loose 80% of it's users, even if a really promising competitor emerged.

nrao123• 13 years ago

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...

---

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...

--- 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• 13 years ago

I think another close analogy is fashion.

jobeirne• 13 years ago

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

nirajd• 13 years ago

$FB

thematt• 13 years ago

Translation: short the stock

hoopism3• 13 years ago

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

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

pessimizer3• 13 years ago

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.

hoopism3• 13 years ago

Click the "forecast" button. Google disagrees.

this_user• 13 years ago

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.

bhouston2• 13 years ago

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...

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?

chaz2• 13 years ago

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.

bhouston2• 13 years ago

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...

morgante3• 13 years ago

Here's a hint: people don't Google for Google.

dmazin• 13 years ago

iirc, at least a few years ago `google` was actually one of the most popular Google searches.

tsotha• 13 years ago

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

Why would anyone be Googling "facebook" at this point?

ddebernardy• 13 years ago

For the same reason people google for google or gmail: they don't know the url.

Yes, there really are people like that. Lots of them.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

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.

ForHackernews2• 13 years ago

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.

codemonkeymike• 13 years ago

I agree, things that I used to do on Facebook, discuss topics and articles, say whats on my mind, play games, and post photos can all be done better else were. Where I see a shift in my Facebook friends list is most people have inactive accounts but are active on Twitter, Redit etc.

dictum• 13 years ago

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.

ThomPete3• 13 years ago

Snapchat and Pinterest is hardly fragmented internet life and it has every bit as big a world domination wish as FB.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

For me, its a scale thing. The 800M users is 80% of Facebook's user base give or take. Seems like more than a fad, definitely an itch was being scratched. For example the migration from MySpace to Facebook was pretty clear, but I don't see the bulk of Facebook's audience heading to some other service.

That said, its entirely possible that "social" is a fad, and certainly that internet social is way to wide a network than old fashion neighborhood social (invest in NextDoor I guess :-) but I'm still convinced that the value proposition of amplifying your ability to maintain a larger web of relationships is still a thing. Not many people are natural super connectors and Facebook takes more ordinary people a lot closer to that.

TeMPOraL3• 13 years ago

At some point people will just get sick of having a separate social network (with separate, even though maybe synced, friend lists) for every single thing they do. I for one would love if Facebook ate Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp - I'm already sick of using separate apps for something that could benefit from being tightly integrated with FB.

dchuk• 13 years ago

It seems that that 14-24 demographic is flocking to less general "social networks" and more image-centric or one-to-one social networking apps, like Instagram and Snapchat. Essentially networks that allow them to not see what their parents/aunts/other families are sharing or taking pictures of.

tleite• 13 years ago

I think the social usage is becoming much more fragmented. I tend to keep up with my family via WhatsApp and Instagram, business contacts via Linkedin and the rest is Twitter.

politician• 13 years ago

Hasbro doesn't die just because the current crop of 5-12 year olds outgrow their products. Instead, they simply target the next wave.

On the other hand, social networks seem to adhere very strongly to a particular generation or crowd. I don't find it too difficult to believe that different crowds use different social networks (due to network effects bootstrapping at differing rates in differing groups) and that consequently "the Facebook" of the next generation will be Snapchat or something else.

Facebook's challenge, then, is to figure out how to become Hasbro or else it will become Myspace.

ryanhuff• 13 years ago

Yes, and as Hasbro does so, they destroy one of my favorite games as a kid (Risk). Sorry for the tangential comment, but I was floored I discovered what they did to the game, as I was searching for Risk (the classic) at local stores to buy for my kids.

Fomite3• 13 years ago

First, it's viruses, not virii. And viruses are not the sum totality of infectious diseases.

Second, as I mentioned in another comment, a very easy extension of this model allows infectious diseases to reach a state where they exist at equilibrium within the population. I have no idea why the authors didn't use them.

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

Facebook is pretty dead traffic wise already...

contacternst• 13 years ago

Step 1: Make totally ridiculous claims about social giant

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit

drdeadringer• 13 years ago

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.

swombat7• 13 years ago

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.

bwood2• 13 years ago

The largest indicator of bullshit (as I've commented below) is that based on their model, ALL infections of this type go to zero. They could have modeled Apple, Google, Christianity, or Bitcoin and reach the same conclusion (albeit with different timeframes, I'm sure).

civilian• 13 years ago

The rise in consumption of hamburgers follows an infectious curve-- thus we predict that humanity will be hamburger-free within 2090. /s

Agreed. Not everything is a fad.

Fomite3• 13 years ago

I am rather surprised by this constraint on the model, as an extremely straightforward modification to the standard SIR model allows for diseases to reach an endemic equilibrium state.

jgalt212• 13 years ago

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

how did you get so many karma points using such coarse language? It brings down the level of discourse.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

Even pg noted that top comments are largely awful. I find just skipping the first one makes reading HN a much more interesting experience.

VMG• 13 years ago

the topic doesn't warrant a high level of discourse

swombat7• 13 years ago

The level of discourse was brought down to below zero by the article. I'm actually raising it, if anything. This is an appallingly bad "forecast" and I'm slightly ashamed on behalf of Princeton for allowing their name to be associated with it.

Also, if you look at my comment history, I don't habitually use "such coarse language". I only use it in appropriate circumstances - like in response to this article. The coarse language has little to do with the karma.

Edit: worth noting that the title of the article on Guardian is "Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017", not may. That has been editorialised by the submitter. The article is even worse than you may think if all you read was the title.

TelmoMenezes• 13 years ago

Oh give me a break. He made a very good point -- the article takes the epidemiological model analogy too far and in a non-rigorous fashion. You are the one "lowering the level of discourse" by focusing on form instead of content and by writing in clichés.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

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?

jarrett7• 13 years ago

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.

swombat7• 13 years ago

Why do I believe it will? Seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. There are plenty of other tech businesses that saw meteoritic growth, and they didn't all peter out like diseases.

Many forces that are at play with diseases (immunity for one) are absent with tech products, and a big one from tech products (the fact that the tech product is built by a company filled with intelligent people who want it to succeed) is absent from diseases.

Infectious diseases seems like a pretty tenuous analogy for a 10-year old tech business with thousands of employees.

crgt• 13 years ago

Their model is based on search query volume. Is it possible people simply don't need to Google for Facebook any more?

wildster• 13 years ago

An analogy can an have predictive power when there is no evidence?

wisty• 13 years ago

It depends on the virus. Most viruses you can only get once, then you fight off the infection (according to the model, anyway). Facebook may be a little more like herpes.

mbillie17• 13 years ago

Perhaps the main reason why we are so strongly inclined to talk of the head as the locality of our thoughts is this: the existence of the words "thinking" and "thought" alongside of the words denoting (bodily) activities, such as writing, speaking, etc., makes us look for an activity, different from these but analogous to them, corresponding to the word "thinking". When words in our ordinary language have prima facie analogous grammars we are inclined to try to interpret them analogously; i.e. we try to make the analogy hold throughout. -- We say, "The thought is not the same as the sentence; for an English and a French sentence, which are utterly different, can express the same thought". And now, as the sentences are somewhere, we look for a place for the thought. (It is as though we looked for the place of the king of which the rules of chess treat, as opposed to the places of the various bits of wood, the kings of the various sets.) -- We say, "surely the thought is something; it is not nothing"; and all one can answer to this is, that the word "thought" has its use, which is of a totally different kind from the use of the word "sentence".

^ that's Wittgenstein and not me writing there, but I believe that responds to your claim adequately.

gaius2• 13 years ago

Right but we can do science here. Myspace, Friendster, Google+... We know a lot about how social networking plays out. There's enough of a sample size there to start doing some observations and making some hypothesis.

morgante3• 13 years ago

No, there's not. In what universe is (optimistically) 5 data points a sufficiently large sample?

mbillie17• 13 years ago

So there's 'we know the way social media plays out' and there's actual science and the two phenomena have nothing in common beyond 'we drew conclusions based on what we saw'. The difference is that the latter is rigorously controlled, tested and peer-reviewed for according to a vetted methodology, and the former is no different from saying 'basically all asian people I have met are good at math, thus this new asian person I have just now met must also be good at math'

gdulli• 13 years ago

"So the argument is:"

It's an interesting way of looking at it, but there doesn't need to be a more complicated explanation for the eventual fall of Facebook than the fact that it's always been the pattern for social networks. There's fundamentally more novelty than real value to it so people will lose interest and it will be supplanted by whatever else has the property of being novel. (And lucky, and in the right place at the right time.)

You just don't need something like Facebook to stay connected to your close friends, and the interactions you have with your larger "network" are inherently shallow and capable of being disrupted in the move from one social network to another or disposed of completely.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

it's always been the pattern for social networks.

For individual social networks, yes. But what if we lumped all social networks together, and looked at aggregate usage over time? It would constantly increase. I think that instead of dying out, it will plateau until we reach saturation. Other communication technologies follow this model: radio, television, telephones, cell phones, etc.

Rather than being a novelty, I think that the past decade has demonstrated that online social networks are something most people want and will continue to use.

To be clear, you and I are making contradicting factual predictions about the future. Neither of us knows which prediction will turn out to be true. At the moment, the available data fits both of our predictions. We'll know in about 20 years.

smackfu• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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.

alkonaut2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

stormcrowsx• 13 years ago

People are still logging in everyday. Maybe not you, but I know plenty of people who belong to groups that log in everyday to see what the group is up to. As long as they can monetize that, it will always be around.

People with children will log on for many many more years to upload pictures of their children to share with their parents. Those parents aren't going to move to another social network. In their eyes Facebook works great why sign up for a Twitter account, and Instagram account, and a Vine account etc.

r00fus• 13 years ago

Are they monetizing it adequately, though.

FB being decimated by 2017 is ridiculous. However, it could be sidelined as Zuck and crowd can't find a way to make increasing dollars out of their userbase without driving them off.

bwood2• 13 years ago

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...

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

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

prjohnson• 13 years ago

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

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

gus_massa• 13 years ago

Previous discussion from a different report of the same new: 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

scelerat2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

mbillie17• 13 years ago

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.

ghop02• 13 years ago

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).

scelerat2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

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.

md2242• 13 years ago

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) 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). 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.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

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.

eloff• 13 years ago

I think the methodology is deeply flawed because of the growing number of mobile users who are mostly using native Facebook apps and they definitely won't be Googling for that.

I would prefer to think it means people have realized they can type facebook.com into the address bar and just go straight there. But that's probably just wishful thinking.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

fb.com also works and is shorter.

mbillie17• 13 years ago

Modern browsers have made it much easier to get to the page you want, I think. If you're in the address bar, probably for most people "f" or at most "fa" will pre-fill facebook.com, then you're talking 3 button-strokes... I'm curious how many one-letter chrome-autofill-suggestions I regularly rely on, but for me, muscle memory dictates t-f-enter to get to facebook (t opens a tab when using vimium, but you can substitute command-t if you like).

Then again I am a developer and I use vim, so I think about things like how many keystrokes it took me to execute a command... :/

grahamel• 13 years ago

I agree. What that fact shows is that people are no longer searching for Facebook (either to get the site or find out what it is) but now people either know what Facebook is, or have been to the site enough for it to prepopulate when typing fa..

A better stat (which Facebook provide in one way or other) to base on is the number of active users, time on the platform and devices used to interact.

shas32• 13 years ago

One difference between AOL and Facebook is that Facebook has hired some of the most talented CS folks of this generation, e.g. Yann LeCun. If their management has the vision to foresee the social network's slide to irrelevance, they can leverage the talent to adapt. This is how it works for companies that have adapted well and lived through and grown amid some of the greatest technological upheavels ever: IBM is over a hundred years old, Microsoft is close 40+, HP is 50+, Xerox, Sony, Intel, Honeywell, AMD, Dow, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, P&G, 3M, etc. etc.

Hire top talent and make strategic acquisitions ---> Innovate ---> Get lucky with strategy at the executive level ---> Sail or sink.

You could also go the way of Kodak, which always hired top talent, and still lose out, but at the end of the day, predicting success or failure of such a huge entity (in terms of $ and no. of users) isn't as easy as it is made out to be in this paper. I think everyone tends to take a simplistic approach. While AOL came out of the IT boom, so did Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Akamai, and a bunch of other companies which continue to do well.

With the kind of investment that Facebook is capable of attracting, they can either become the next IBM or the next AOL.

untilHellbanned2• 13 years ago

AOL hired talented people too.

incongruity2• 13 years ago

The problem isn't with the code -- it's with market & business viability and end-user desirability.

"Get lucky with strategy at the executive level"

I love how the most important part is hand waved away to luck.

IBM, Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, Akamai all had/have a solid, long-lasting strategy around making things that are: 1) Desirable to users/buyers/decision makers 2) Feasible, but sufficiently advanced from a technological perspective and 3) Viable from a business perspective, over something more than a short-run.

AOL and Facebook both did 1&2 pretty well (exceptionally well, in many ways) but #3 both fell short on -- Facebook has never had a really strong monetization strategy and now they're potentially slipping in terms of user desirability (amongst some segments) and still, they're failing to find an outright win with their monetization strategies. Ultimately, I think the OP was pretty spot on.

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

wozniacki2• 13 years ago

Plus they are continuing to attract a host of litigation from both individuals[1] and nations, alike.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/03/technology/facebook-privacy-...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/195351255/Campbell-v-Facebook

scott_s2• 13 years ago

I think the sheer number of people on Facebook is a meaningful differentiation.

robodale• 13 years ago

I get your humor (as I pull another PBR out of my personal cooler on my porch)

vehementi• 13 years ago

I use a lot of things every day that I don't google, mostly because I know about them.

loceng• 13 years ago

It's how they manage the ecosystem that matters, and they've never understood really what they're doing. That's my opinion of course, though all we can do see is watch to see what happens to FB.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

I think a big difference between MySpace and Facebook is that MySpace targeted indie bands and teenagers - people who aren't going to be thoroughly married to a platform.

Facebook started with college students that are a little less ephemeral, but has spread out to soccer-moms and grandparents. Those folks are far less fickle.

Even if Facebook loses the younger users, it will have a rock-solid userbase for decades. The company might be doomed, but this is going to be a very very long tail. Its downfall will look more like Sears than FourSquare.

araes• 13 years ago

Facebook was founded in February, 2004, almost exactly 10 years ago. A lot of those college students it started off with are already the soccer moms of today.

ralphc• 13 years ago

Other differences: Facebook had MySpace and other early social networks to see what they did wrong. In addition to just the general not-keeping-up-with-the-times, the excessive customization + bored teens = eyes bleeding & having to look at different places on a page to get the same info. Although it's gotten worse it's still cleaner than MySpace was during its heyday. Also, Facebook has Zuckerburg. Whatever you say about him, he's smart and focused on keeping users, so there's constant tweaks to see what will keep them.

adiM• 13 years ago

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).

gkoberger• 13 years ago

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.

elwell• 13 years ago

Then how will people log into my app?

RuCrazy• 13 years ago

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

blisterpeanuts4• 13 years ago

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.

lowglow• 13 years ago

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.

LocalPCGuy• 13 years ago

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.

mbillie17• 13 years ago

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.

sbirksted• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

   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).

timedoctor• 13 years ago

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.

pistle• 13 years ago

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.

ExpendableGuy• 13 years ago

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.

Facebook may lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers

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