Facebook is not doomed to die like MySpace

Sure, Facebook isn't as "cool" as Snapchat. But that doesn't mean the company is toast.

Social media graveyard
(Image credit: (Illustration by Lauren Hansen | Image courtesy Thinkstock))

Facebook may lose as many as 80 percent of its users by 2017, according to a new study.

John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler of Princeton University used models of the spread of disease to explain user adoption and abandonment of social networks, where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery. They found that MySpace had grown and declined in exactly this disease-like manner — fast growth, a peak, and then a decline. (The researchers used searches as a proxy measurement for adoption — the idea being that if someone searches "MySpace" or "Facebook," more often than not it's a non-user interested in joining.)

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John Aziz is the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate editor at Pieria.co.uk. Previously his work has appeared on Business Insider, Zero Hedge, and Noahpinion.