(Image source from: Death of Facebook by 2017?})

A new research has revealed that Facebook may lose its charm due to overpopularity and die by 2017. The researchers from Princeton University suggest that the social media's popularity at present is like a plague, but with its increasing popularity users are bound to lose charm and abandon it, causing death.

The growing membership of the social media has been compared to an epidemic, like the bubonic plague, that will fizzle out gradually. They even claimed that 80% of its members will abandon the social media in the next three years, that is by 2017 Facebook will be dead.

During their research, Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella from Princeton University studied social networks using equations that are done to figure out the spread and recovery during epedemics. After that the researchers applied the data gathered from MySpace on Facebook to study the boom and crash. The study predicted that before 2017 Facebook user count will fall by 80%.

However, it is not clear whether equations that work for epidemics can actually predict the decline of Facebook. The success or failure of a site depends on many other factors and it's probably too simplistic a method. But recently David Ebersman, Facebook's chief financial officer, admitted that the membership of the site is indeed decreasing, especially among the young teenagers. So the study could be a reality.

(Picture Source: .czugo.cz)

(AW: Pratima Tigga)