Thursday, May 13, 2010

Has Quitting Facebook Been Gaining Steam?

There are some permabears who believe that moods drive people's action. According to this school, negative mood prompts people to cloister or become less open.

And in spotting few instances of people deactivating their Facebook accounts, such permabears declare a generalized trend towards social insulation.


Unfortunately this is simply not true or could be discerned as a fallacy of composition (making mountain of an anthill).

The chart from Nielsen/Marketingcharts.com shows that Facebook has been generating most of the recent gains among social media outfit in the US last March. In addition, the gains of Facebook has surged (and not collapsed) in spite of the 2008 crisis.

Where Facebook has reached more than 400 million members worldwide, see Facebook's statistics here, it would be natural for some among the huge number of people to become discontented enough to prompt them to quit for one reason or another.

But the point is to see whether trends in membership are NET positive or negative. The generalized net positive gains, so far, debunks the negative social mood outlook.

Anyway ABC News has an interesting article about Quitting Facebook.

1 comment:

DARG said...

Kudos to a very compelling outlook on Facebook.