NDM -Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers

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

This article focuses on the issue of Facebook losing a large amount of users by 2017, according to researchers at Princeton University. Although Facebook has beat other social networking sites such as Bebo and Myspace, researchers have argued it will lose 80% of its users within three years.

Significantly, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler (from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department) argued that they based their prediction on the amount of time Facebook is typed in Google search box. Based on this, they identified that Facebook searches decreased in December 2012 and is still occurring. In this article it is stated that, "ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models". This could imply that the researchers are comparing social media as a "disease", which may highlight the idea of new social networking sites emerging and therefore old social sites would not be as popular among the young generation.

Moreover, Facebook had nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users in October which was caused by updates. Although traffic numbers were decreasing, many people were accessing the social networking site through their smart phones which could suggest that Facebook is still popular among people. According to statistics, 870 million people are using Facebook through their smartphones each month would could explain the decrease in Google searches. This is because, people who have the app on their phones are no longer typing the name 'Facebook' into Google and therefore it makes it seem as if Facebook is becoming unpopular. Additionally, Facebook's chief financial officer David Ebersman states: "We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens". 

Overall, it can be argued that Facebook is becoming unpopular among the people because of the development of new social networking sites. For instance, Instagram is extremely popular alongside with Twitter or Snap chat. As a result, some people could hardly use Facebook if they are more interested and engaged with other social networking site.