Facebook Soon to Lose 80% of Users, Study Says

Two Princeton University doctoral students have written a study that predicts Facebook will follow MySpace into oblivion, Time reports.

Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, who are studying in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, developed a theoretical model  that compares the social media site to an infectious disease.

Facebook is forecast to spread awhile longer and before it dies.

The Spechler-Cannarella model predicts that Facebook users will lose interest in the social media platform as time goes on and it will face a swift decline — losing 80 percent of its peak membership by 2017.

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The two scholars used a modified epidemiological model called adoption and abandonment to try to understand the momentum of how users embrace and then drop online social networks.

For statistics they used data available by searching Google.

The study has not yet been peer reviewed.

Both scholars have Facebook pages of their own — at least for now.

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