Scott Golder at HP Labs who co-authored an excellent paper about del.icio.us may have now done the same for Facebook with a paper entitled “Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network” by Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman @ Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs.

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.

Relevance: I use Facebook quite regularly as a university student and I want to see how much I agree with the findings. I am also interested in sharing this paper with other regulars.

Technorati Tags: , , ,