Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging Within a Massive Online Network

This paper studies the social net- work service Facebook, which began in early 2004 in select universities, but grew quickly to encompass a very large number of universities.

Abstract

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