Baku, January 22 (AZERTAC). According to new research from Princeton, which compared the ”adoption and abandonment dynamics” of social networks by “drawing analogy to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease,” Facebook is beginning to die out. "Like the bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually come to an end," writes Eric Markowitz of Vocativ.

The engineers used epidemiological models to draw their conclusions. What is an epidemiology model? It's a model used to predict or track the development of an epidemic.

Social media, some would argue, is an epidemic. And for this study, researchers used what's knows as the SIR model, a collection of three ordinary components that help us understand the behavior of an entire population: (susceptible S, infected I, and recovered R) evolve during a disease outbreak. Mathematically, S + I + R = N, with N signifying population, independent of time.

This assumption is valid for disease outbreaks that are short lived compared to the lifespan of the population members. Eventually, they reach a critical peak and then their prevalence or popularity declines, and that's what the folks at Princeton wanted to see: could the same be true of online social network (OSN) adoption dynamics?

The team first considered the case of MySpace because it represents one of the largest social networks in history to exhibit the full life cycle--from rise to fall. MySpace's entire lifespan occurred within the range of search query data available from Google Trends, made available only after January 2004. Here's how MySpace looks according to the public data available from historical Google search.

“Ideas, like diseases,” the researchers note, ”have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models.” The complete study by John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University can be found here, and concludes that Facebook's decline has already begun. Diseases are like ideas, the study says, and continues: “Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of ‘immunity’ to the idea.”

Eric Markowitz reminds us to take the study with a grain of salt. "Its authors are smart, for sure, but they’re based in the school’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering—which isn’t exactly well-known for its reports on social networks."

I mean, these guys aren't even on Twitter. And Markowitz further points out that Arvix, the journal in which the study appeared, is not peer-reviewed.

Good study guys, now Facebook "Like" this article, and get in there and complete that Twitter profile so you can tweet about it. I promise social media is only mildly contagious.