Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network

TL;DR

This study analyzes a massive anonymized dataset from Microsoft Messenger, revealing insights into global communication patterns, social network structure, and factors influencing human interactions on a planetary scale.

Contribution

It constructs and analyzes the largest social network to date, providing new empirical insights into global communication dynamics and social connectivity.

Findings

The communication graph is highly connected and robust.

Average path length among users is 6.6, supporting the six degrees of separation.

People communicate more with similar age, language, and location; cross-gender conversations are more frequent and longer.

Abstract

We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by ``six degrees of separation'' and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We also find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.