It seems social networks have been successful in creating and organizing virtual societiesS, although some of these networks like Facebook achieved significant success. A considerable number of users - more than 1.11 billion members - and a huge amount of links constructs Facebook as a complex world wide network. Due to the out of equilibrium nature of complex networks -including virtual societies- is it possible to imagine a collapse of Facebook? What is the main characteristic of a failure triggering factor?
I don't think we can imagine a real collapse of Facebook. May be, transformations may take place and new social networks may try to compete with Facebook
In graphical point of view (node-edge), a social network like facebook has several nodes with a lot of connections or edges ( like famous and popular people or some special pages) that attract large number of facebook users and in contrast there are large number of nodes with few connections or edges. Complex systems are insensitive to random deletions but they aren't robust against targeted attacks against hubs (nodes with large number of edges) so face book may collapse and loose function if you attack hubs or impose an equilibrium evading factor
"Complex systems are insensitive to random deletions but they aren't robust against targeted attacks against hubs (nodes with large number of edges) so face book may collapse and loose function if you attack hubs or impose an equilibrium evading factor"
This begs the question what "losing function" means in the context of a social network. For a transportation or communication network, it is easy to imagine how hub failure could disconnect the network, so it loses its function, which is routing things between any pair of nodes. Having many connected components is not necessarily a problem in a social network.
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