The silent majority

Some headlines:

Herald: “Dead people on Facebook could outnumber the living”

Stuff: “There will be more dead people than living on Facebook”

But not any time soon:

Daily Mail: “Facebook will become the world’s biggest virtual graveyard with more profiles of dead people than living users by the end of the century, say experts”

So who are these experts? They are a statistician, Hachem Saddiki. The original idea came from Fusion, where Kristen V. Brown raised the question of when declining growth and lack of automatic deletion after death would lead to a majority of dead accounts, and looked for someone to work it out.

The Fusion story talks about some of the uncertainties — how fast will Facebook grow, what will happen to death rates across the world.  It doesn’t consider death rates of companies and technologies, though.

A 2012 report said

According to the report, the 61-year tenure for the average firm in 1958 narrowed to 25 years in 1980—to 18 years in 2011. At the current churn rate, 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.

You might expect Facebook to last longer than average, but there must be some chance it doesn’t make it to four times the average.

Much more importantly, will Facebook survive the technology transitions in anything like its current form — the equivalent of moving from player piano to Spotify in the music world?

Mark Twain noted in Life on the Mississippi

“In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year.”

His conclusion might well apply to the Facebook prediction: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”