[LINK] Two links on the decline of Facebook and the rise of WeChat

[rfmcdonald]

io9's Robert Gonzalez linked to a recent paper arguing that the growth and decline of Facebook can be predicted by epidemiological models.

By drawing similarities between Facebook's rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv. The basic premise is simple: epidemiological models, the researchers argue, can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, "where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery."

The authors have based their models on data that reflect the number of times "Facebook" has been typed into Google as a search term. Checking Google Trends reveals that these weekly "search queues" reached a peak in December of 2012, and have since begun to level off. Plugging these figures into a modified SIR model for the spread of infectious disease – the researchers call theirs an "infection recovery," or "irSIR," model – yields the chart at the top of this post, and "suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."

The researchers tested their model by comparing Google search query data for "Myspace" against adoption/abandonment curves predicted by both traditional and infectious recovery SIR models, demonstrating "that the traditional SIR model for modeling disease dynamics provides a poor description of the data." By comparison, the search query data matches up rather neatly with the proposed irSIR model.

I read about WeChat's dynamic growth in David Barboza's recent New York Times article. In its, Barboza argues that WeChat has not only preempted Facebook in China, but that it might well be one of the first Chinese global Internet brands. (Longtime readers of the blog might remember that both of my cell phones have been Huaweis.)

Weixin is the creation of Tencent, the Chinese Internet powerhouse known for its QQ instant messenger service and its popular online games. Tencent, which is publicly traded and is worth more than $100 billion on the Hong Kong exchange, is now seeking to strengthen that grip in social networking and expand into new areas, such as online payment and e-commerce.

[. . .]

Tencent, meanwhile, is so confident of its messaging app that it is promoting Weixin overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, where there are already tens of millions of users. The company also plans a marketing blitz in Europe and Latin America, using the name WeChat. The company declined to say whether or when it would promote the service in the United States.

Weixin could help change global perceptions of Chinese companies. Although Chinese Internet companies are still considered knockoffs of Google, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, analysts say they are quickly transforming themselves into dynamic, innovative technology companies with unique business models.

Weixin, for instance, is no mere copy of an existing service but an amalgam of various social networking tools: part Facebook, part Instagram and even part walkie-talkie. Rather than send a short mobile phone message by typing Chinese characters, which can be time-consuming, users simply hold down a button that records a voice message.

“Chinese Internet companies are no longer behind,” says William Bao Bean, a former technology analyst who is now a managing director at the venture capital firm SingTel Innov8. “Now, in some areas, they’re leading the way.”