Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging Within a Massive Online Network

Overview

This paper has 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. The paper also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online "Friend" list affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, it shows that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.