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The Fall of Facebook

Facebook has risen out of the blue, becoming a success story practically overnight. Facebook then stayed as the giant of social media for over five years. One question has always followed Facebook through its reign: “Will it end?” A couple of years ago Facebook looked like it would never end, but now Facebook looks like it will fall, maybe sooner than everyone expects.

The article talks about how Facebook grew like an infectious disease, spreading almost overnight into the popularity it now has.  It presents a graph made by a team of researchers from Princeton, which uses the history of the popularity of Facebook to predict its future. This graph predicts that Facebook will have as rapid a decline as it rose in popularity, having an 80% decrease in users over the upcoming year.

Lately in class we have been talking about how the perceived popularity of a social network can directly influence the success of the social network. Using this idea to look at Facebook we can then analyze the likelihood of a rapid decline happening to Facebook. In class we looked at how the increase or decrease of the popularity of a social network can have a cascading effect; once a small number people start to leave then that would cause more people to leave and so on and so forth. We can use this model to predict a widespread decline in the prominence of Facebook; if it follows the model, the trajectory of Facebook may legitimately plummet by this extreme amount in the coming year. The attached article shows this effect in its estimation in the future of Faceboook.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2544200/Facebook-like-infectious-disease-claim-researchers-say-peaked-lose-80-percent-users-YEAR.html

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