Bernardo Huberman writes, in private correspondence, of the latest paper out of his HP Labs group, Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network (PDF) by Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson, and Bernardo Huberman: “We just finished a fairly deep analysis of more than 300 million messages among users of facebook, and found some startling regularities. The timing of messages, as you can see on figures 5 and 6, looks like the regular hearbeat of an organism, and given the enormous size of the network it was quite surprising.

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.

Bernardo Huberman writes, in private correspondence, of the latest paper out of his HP Labs group, Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network (PDF) by Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson, and Bernardo Huberman: “We just finished a fairly deep analysis of more than 300 million messages among users of facebook, and found some [...]