Facebook will be largely abandoned by 2017, say Princeton researchers, after comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease. Are you a committed Facebook user or has the social network lost its appeal?

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Facebook has spread like an infectious disease but we are slowly becoming immune to its attractions, according to researchers at Princeton.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," claim John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department.

Their predictions are based on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term – with searches having peaked in December 2012 but trailing off since.



The 870 million users accessing the social network via their mobile phones may explain the dwindling desktop traffic. But Facebook's chief financial officer David Ebersman admitted: "We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens."

What do you think? Will Facebook die out like the bubonic plague? Tell us how and why you use the social network, and how your use has changed over time.

We'll publish a selection of comments above the line.