Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014)
> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.<p>Well, yeah... The more people are already familiar with facebook, the less they will be googling/researching it. If anything, considering the popularity of Facebook at the time, it should have been seen as a sign of vitality.<p>I'm pretty disappointed that the Princeton researchers were so blinded by googlinums that they forget those googlinums don't exist in a vacuum. Probably why mechanical and aerospace engineers aren't fit to make predictions of a social nature (among other engineers, too, sadly).