Slashdot Mirror
E-Mail Can Reveal Your Friend Hierarchy
sciencehabit writes "It's not surprising that someone could guess your friends simply by peeking at your e-mail. But a more detailed look at your electronic communications could reveal which friends are closer to you than others, according to a new study. The trick has to do with response time--the time it takes for a sender to respond to e-mails from different contacts. The fastest responses went to friends and that the slowest responses went to acquaintances, with colleagues somewhere in between."
My fastest reply is always to the person who will make me the most money. My friends can wait.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I don't communicate with friends via email.
I am sure that instances like going on vacation can skew the hierarchy. If you often go for a few days without email access it will easily mess up how quickly you reply to various emails.
Facebook would like me to offer them up my email addresses so they can helpfully locate my friends on Facebook.
Cold day in Hell when I agree to that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Seems to me this only lets you know how wired a correspondent is. My acquaintance X answers me much faster than my good friend Y because all of X's mail goes to his phone and Y doesn't get to check their email until the evening when they get home.
With texting and social networking sites, who actually emails their friends anymore? Everyone I know only uses email for work. Although I'd assume that the same would apply to those media as well.
Who emails their friends? I use different methods of communication...
E-mail is so 2003. Though I suppose the same would apply to facebook/twitter/blog coments/sms/im today.
My friends know my phone number, twitter account and other contact information. They don't send me emails.
why would you let somebody else peek at your email? It's not strange they found relationships if they examined *all* the email data of some firm. I hope they had permission to do so... Okay, the email you send as an employee is property of the employer, but still...
Sig?
My boss and other superiors must be my best friends in that case.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Mixed-mode communication completely breaks this:
When I get a really long email from a friend or family member asking a question that would take longer to write out than to explain over the phone, I'll wait until I'm free and then give them a call. I guess that means from an email perspective that I hate them and never reply.
Or what about various organization mailing lists where you reply to the sender with a new email instead of sending something to the whole list?
Of course this is all irrelevant because this study isn't really intended for emails, despite how they report it - it's for social networking sites with embedded messaging systems to be able to mine more data about you, so they can show you ads that your "closer" friends have clicked on in addition to matching with your profile items, so they can charge more for ads.
There needs to be an 'obvious' moderation option. Did anyone seriously not know this already?
ICQ launched in 1996!
E-Mail... next they be tellin' us about how "Ye horse-mounted letter carriers doth uncovereth thine royal household, verily!".
I responded to an email that the police sent to me -- perhaps the quickest of them all. Especially in this case; they are NOT my friend. (They are refusing to communicate with me, and refusing to investigate the death of my daughter. Asking a question about how to report other crimes at the same time: Response "I'm not going to divulge every aspect of the investigation to you" after three weeks of waiting.)
Too bad I never communicate with friends via email. Hell, I hardly communicate with anyone via email, except for work. This seems both obvious and completely pointless. Obvious that you're going to reply to people you like faster than others, and completely pointless in that I don't know anyone who does all of their conversing through email.
I'll respond to (1) and email in which I can make money (Income related, Nigerians in dire straits, etc.), (2) easy-to-answer emails, and (3) all others. I apparently have no friends.
Really? the timing and frequency with which you communicate tells you something about your closeness to friends and associates... really?
Perhaps who you call and calls you, and how often and how long...
this counts as news? Investigative Research 101?
Money was spent on this study?
"the time it takes for a sender to respond to e-mails from different contacts"
You mean "the time it takes for a recipient to respond..."
That is odd, the people I have the most persistent email exchange with are the ones whose ideas are the most different from my own. I just love the challenge. Also they can put up with some partial disagreement from my side.
I have other friends that I don't need to talk to because we don't have much to fight about. I suppose I'm different.
Je me souviens.
Do you communicate with business or work colleagues via email? Is there overlap?
For professionals, the distinction is often blurry or nonexistent.
People use multiple means of communication. Get over yourself.
This technique wouldn't work on me. I answer emails according to how much time the answer is likely to take. If it's going to take a while, I always put it off until later. If it's a one word or couple of words answer, chances are good you'll get a response right away.
http://www.spoke.com/ - we really *do* read your email (headers, at least). When we were first bringing the service online, we figured out many heuristics for measuring closeness, as well as other attributes of a social connection, all based upon publicly available email information.
I've been telling people I know for a couple years now - Google has the biggest, most information-rich social graph on the planet. Which is why I don't use gmail unless I am forced to by an employer.
Someone did that decades ago at Harvard, when they first got an electronic phone switch which logged internal calls. They were able to construct an organization chart of the university from the phone traffic. How fast someone called back after a message was left was a key indicator.
Most of my friends are in one time zone, my relatives in yet another, my colleagues in several others. Response times are laregly governed by who's asleep.
Honestly, we designed such stuff in classes at university. And yes you can do such things with e-mails and every other form of communication. Nice are also analyzes of mailing lists of OSS projects, you can determine the group structure and it works for alumni networks. You can do this with icq logs (oh it has already been done). Ask Google if you want to know what they can find in your e-mail.
BTW: All such methods, however, rely on a model on human behavior. If your subjects fail to confirm to that model you get wrong results. But that is nothing new to empirical science.