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acebook is like an infectious disease, experiencing a spike before its decline, according to US researchers who claim the social network will lose 80 percent of users by 2017.

Two doctoral candidates in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University made their astonishing claims in a paper published online at a scientific research archive, but not yet peer-reviewed.

Based on the rise and fall of MySpace, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler say that Facebook, the largest online social network in history, is set for a massive fall. '€œIdeas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,'€ they wrote.

They applied a modified epidemiological model to describe the dynamics of user activity of online social networks, using Google data.