Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network

TL;DR

This study analyzes 362 million Facebook messages over 26 months to uncover daily, weekly, and seasonal patterns in social interactions among college students, revealing clustering by school and influences of social factors.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of large-scale messaging data to identify temporal regularities and social clustering patterns in online interactions.

Findings

Strong daily and weekly messaging regularities

Seasonal variations in messaging behavior

Users cluster by school based on messaging patterns

Abstract

We have analyzed the fully-anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online friend lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.