Temporal Pattern of Communication: Messaging Within a Mobile Social Networking App

With the emergence of mobile Internet and social media, human relationship has evolved into a new form due to the much broader reach and more efficient communications enabled by information technology. This paper examines the communication pattern and impact on social group in the context of a Chinese popular mobile social media app. It analyzes a dataset that comprised of the information about sending and receiving messages by 10,000 users over one month period. It found a strong temporal pattern of a significant difference between Monday and other days: the least frequent usages on Monday among the week. The average number of friends a user has messaging contacts with is about 2, far less than the number of friends a user has in total, which can reflect the attributes of users maintaining their social network and friendship.