Thursday, 23 January 2014

Facebook just won today's “Data journalism” award - Mirror.co.uk

They use SCIENCE to predict Princeton University will disappear

First, the backstory. Researchers at Princeton University recently published a paper about Facebook. It said:

In this paper we use epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs, where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery.

Yeah, whatever, science stuff. The line that people reported out of it?

Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017

Facebook's response?

"Like many of you, we were intrigued by a recent article by Princeton researchers predicting the imminent demise of Facebook. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends. Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this "Princeton University" – and you won't believe what we found!

In keeping with the scientific principle "correlation equals causation," our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend"

They then published a series of charts demonstrating Princeton declining in popularity against rivals like Yale and Harvard. Like this one based on Facebook 'Likes'

Facebook chart

Read the whole post here. We say – well played Facebook.

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