ABSTRACT

The Facebook Messenger (FBM) is one of the most popular instant messaging social apps, launched by Facebook in 2010. As of October 2019, there were about 1.3 billion FBM users worldwide. In this study, we analyzed periodicities in the online activity patterns of users in FBM. We did not recruit any subjects in this study; rather four of us used our own FBM accounts to reveal the presence of any rhythms with τ = 12 h or τ = 24 h or τ = 168 h in the patterns FBM usage among our FB friends. We log-transformed the time series data and subjected those to Cosinor rhythmometry. The peaks in the daily pattern of FBM usages, revealed from Cosinor analyses, and harmonics curve fittings validated the presence of multi-frequency rhythms in the longitudinal time-series data captured over a period of 16 days. The underlying basis of the observed multi-frequency rhythms could be attributed to the phenomenon of social synchronization. The current findings might bear commercial applications with special reference to targeted content advertising (TCA).

摘要

Facebook Messenger (FBM) 是 Facebook 于 2010 年推出的最受欢迎的即时通讯社交应用程序之一。截至 2019 年 10 月，全球约有 13 亿 FBM 用户。在这项研究中，我们分析了 FBM 用户在线活动模式的周期性。我们没有在这项研究中招募任何受试者；相反，我们四个人使用我们自己的 FBM 帐户来揭示在我们的 FB 朋友之间的 FBM 使用模式中存在 τ = 12 小时或 τ = 24 小时或 τ = 168 小时的任何节奏。我们对时间序列数据进行了对数转换，并对这些数据进行余弦节律测量。从 Cosinor 分析和谐波曲线拟合揭示的每日 FBM 使用模式的峰值验证了在 16 天期间捕获的纵向时间序列数据中存在多频率节律。观察到的多频节律的潜在基础可归因于社会同步现象。目前的研究结果可能具有商业应用，特别是有针对性的内容广告 (TCA)。