WIRED.CO.UK - Feb 27 - Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology examined Friendster, Livejournal, Facebook, Orkut and Myspace in a bid to identify what makes a social network survive or decline. Changes may cause users to leave, which may trigger further leaves of others who lost connection to their friends. This may lead to cascades of users leaving. Each network has some resistance to this decline, depending on how many friends each users has. If a user has a thousand friends, they will hardly notice when a couple leave. But if a user has three friends and one leaves then they are much more likely to leave themselves. Friendster was founded in 2002 and at its peak had ~100M users. In 2009, having undergone a comprehensive redesign and suffered some technical problems, the site started haemorrhaging users, and was eventually closed down in 2011 and reopened as an online gaming portal.
by Olivia Solon
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