Facebook: Spread Like an Infectious Disease and Could Die Like One Too

 Two engineering doctorates at Princeton university used publicly available data to analyze the decline of Myspace, which was a versatile social network. The students claim that the rise and decline of Myspace was akin to the spread and death of an infectious disease.

They claim that by Christmas 2014 Facebook will lose 20% of its current users and the amount of data (which is a symptom of user activity) will stay on the decline.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," Wrote John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler

Ideas have been argued, as I have argued in previous articles, act analogously to genes. In the sense that it seems like they are trying to survive in a meme pool, trying to spread throughout the cultural world into as many heads as possible. How genes and memes actually perpetuate themselves is wholly dissimilar, genes flow from generation to generation through the process of reproduction... ideas do not have cultural sex. They spread, which now a little evidence may come to justify this, by literally infecting one mind who infects others etc. The rate of infection depends on the content and form of the idea. Facebook seemed to spread at extremely fast rate meaning it was a successful meme. However it has peaked and maybe has reached a saturation point. This means it is all downhill...  how steep that hill is in contention. Myspace rose slowly and died slowly. Facebook could be gone as quick as it came, but all these speculations are just extrapolations of models.

Facebook's stock price is relatively healthy, however this news could effect it's stock price in days to come.

With new and diverse social networks like Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and whatsapp... facebook's monopoly might be shared among these youngsters.

Will all social networking sites endure the same fate? If so the companies should try and maximise profits and investments in other companies as fast or as well as they can.