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.
Who emails their friends? I use different methods of communication...
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?
With the telephone and spending time with someone face-to-face, who actually uses the computer to communicate with their friends anymore? Everyone I know uses text-based electronic means to avoid talking to their "friends"...
Seriously, I use electronic means to communicate with my real friends for a couple of things- to figure out where/when to see them, and to share things that are of mutual interest. If I don't see them in person or at least engage in an interactive discussion using my voice with them then I have a difficult time referring to them as friends. On a related note, I've been in a fandom-oriented social club for almost 20 years, and we meet in person every other week. We have a mailing list, but it's for, again, deciding things or bringing things to the group's attention that then get discussed at meetings. This club has met every other week since 1975 when it was founded, in large part because meeting face to face helps bind the group together better.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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?
Maybe. On the other hand, at some point, the rush to make one's connections instant may peak, and reverse.
Email is a bit less urgent in nature - one tends to think a bit more than a tweet, FB post or IM. And, for me, at least, I don't feel like I'm blowing someone off if I don't respond immediately to an email; far less so with the other types of electronic communications.
Check your premises.
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.
Everyone I know has social networking sites adblocked away. Neither does any of my friends use Twitter. I haven't received a SMS from other sources than the bank, phone company and marketing scum in years as well. The only person I know who uses IM is my sister, but she's a 28 years old kid (with kids of her own but hey).
It might be a generational thing, but at least for me email is an important medium.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
You do realize that communicating via Text, IM or Social Networking is basically the same thing as email - right?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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?
Do you not realize that most of this is simply because you guys are all older people (at least the original members) and are used to communicating this way? There's nothing personal and awesome about asking someone if they're coming home for dinner tonight. It's just trivial efficiency-related chit-chat and I'd rather you text it to me than having to take a call (which may deduce call minutes, which doesn't happen with Internet-based texting) and stop whatever I'm doing at the time, pick up the phone, engage into two minutes of prelude and prologue conversation (that I would've talked to you about anyway at dinner or the next one) and then hang up and resume what I'm doing.
What if I'm on a bus and don't want to be annoying? What if YOU are annoying and I don't want the guy next to me to hear our conversation on said bus? Email and SMS becomes much more useful then.
I'm not saying all communications should be replaced by non-face-to-face communication. You do realize that being on the phone with someone is impersonal just like texting them, right? Sure you hear their voice, but you aren't anywhere near them and cannot really engage in physical social activities (in b4 "but phone sex!" joke). You could've had the same argument about the phone when it was invented, and look where we are today...
Same with Facebook really, is it that bad that people use that as a medium to reach people and talk to them? They're people that they may not have invented to their houses otherwise; is it really worse to talk to them over a website than to not talk to them at all?
I just feel like we keep hearing one side of an argument that just doesn't hold up. In the end it seems more of a matter of preference than anything else, and I have a hard time really believing the whole "SMS is bad cause you don't have real friends" shit after hearing it for so long (not that your post was implying this).
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.
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.
Your argument fails on account of there being only one or two founding members of the group left, and their not being terribly active anymore. The longest-continually-active member joined in about 1980, and he's actually the one who maintains the listserv. I'm in my thirties so I grew up with BBSes and other textual means of communication, and many of the members are computing professionals and are well used to text as a means of communication. Arguably, most of the active members of the club have been in the club less than fifteen years, some less than five, and we still don't use text as our primary means of communication. Yes, most of the original members have moved on, but generally people join and either let their membership lapse at the first time they'd renew, or else they remain members for years and years, even if they don't show up to every meeting.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
But the point of it is that this is a social club, and if we're not going to meet up to do whatever activity we decided upon and happen to have a business meeting along with, why are we even a group?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.