Study says Facebook's public profile is like a killer virus - and it's going to lose customers as a result

WE know it's addictive. But is Facebook a disease? A new study says yes - and that's not good news for the leading social media site. It's killing off its customers.

It relies on "viral" content to keep it's audience hooked. But it seems Facebook's own popularity follows similar disease modelling. AFP / JONATHAN NACKSTRAND

WE know it's addictive. But is Facebook a disease? A new study says yes - and that's not good for the leading social media site. It's killing off its customers.

In fact, the Princeton University study says Facebook will lose a huge chunk of its 1.2 billion users in just three years.

The study, by two Princeton Ph.D. candidates Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, has created a stir by speculating that the world's biggest social network could lose "80% of its peak user base" between 2015 and 2017.

In the study, "Epidemiological modelling of online social networks dynamics," the Princeton students argue that Facebook is already "beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase."

"In this paper, we analyse the adoption and abandonment dynamics of online social networks by drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease," Spechler and Cannarella write.

Facebook, they suggest, is an idea, a fad that, like an illness, can spread - and then eventually fade away. They cited the rise and fall of MySpace.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out," they write.

"Interesting analysis and I'm sure Zuckerberg loves being compared to Typhoid Mary," analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group told MarketWatch, referring to the Facebook founder and chief executive.

" If the disease model holds it suggests that Facebook will need to evolve/mutate in order to begin another curve or it will die out. It has to overcome the immunisation cycle."

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