LONDON— The popularity of Facebook has spread like an infectious disease, but we are slowly becoming immune to its attractions and the platform will be largely abandoned by 2017, researchers at Princeton University have said.

The forecast of Facebook’s impending doom was made by comparing the growth curve of epidemics to those of online social networks. Scientists argue that, like bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually die out.

The social network, which will celebrate its 10th birthday on Feb 4, has survived longer than rivals such as Myspace and Bebo, but the Princeton forecast says it will lose 80 per cent of its peak user base within the next three years.

Mr John Cannarella and Mr 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 GoogleTrends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously among people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” claimed the authors.

“Ideas are spread through communicative contact among different people who share ideas with one another. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest in the concept and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of ‘immunity’ to the idea,” they said.

Facebook reported close to 1.2 billion monthly active users last October and is due to update investors on its traffic numbers at the end of the month. While desktop traffic to its websites has indeed been falling, this is at least partly due to the fact that many people now access the network only via their mobile phones.

For their study, the researchers tested various equations against the lifespan of Myspace, before applying them to Facebook.

Myspace was founded in 2003 and reached its peak in 2007 with 300 million registered users, before falling out of use by 2011.

Purchased by Mr Rupert Murdoch’sNews Corp for US$580 million (S$743 million), Myspace signed a US$900 million deal with Google in 2006 to sell its advertising space and was at one point valued at US$12 billion. It was eventually sold by News Corp for only US$35 million.

The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could explain the drop in Google searches — those looking to log on to the network are no longer doing so by typing the word Facebook into Google.

But Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman admitted: “We did see a decrease in daily users (during the last three months), specifically among younger teens.” THE GUARDIAN