14 research outputs found
Emotional persistence in online chatting communities
How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and
write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in
Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known
power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat
activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the
emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a
remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite
their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in
online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We
provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers
qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional
persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's
emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test
different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.Comment: 34 pages, 4 main and 12 supplementary figure
Bursty egocentric network evolution in Skype
In this study we analyze the dynamics of the contact list evolution of
millions of users of the Skype communication network. We find that egocentric
networks evolve heterogeneously in time as events of edge additions and
deletions of individuals are grouped in long bursty clusters, which are
separated by long inactive periods. We classify users by their link creation
dynamics and show that bursty peaks of contact additions are likely to appear
shortly after user account creation. We also study possible relations between
bursty contact addition activity and other user-initiated actions like free and
paid service adoption events. We show that bursts of contact additions are
associated with increases in activity and adoption - an observation that can
inform the design of targeted marketing tactics.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Social Network Analysis and Mining (2013