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."

Comments

Fast Reply

[alphatel]

My fastest reply is always to the person who will make me the most money. My friends can wait.

Re:Fast Reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Being drunk often breaks this. When I'm drunk, I do everything randomly. Sometimes I email, sometimes I dont. Sometimes it goes to who it belongs to, sometimes it goes to random persons, sometimes it goes to my parents. Sometimes the message can contain valid stuff, sometimes the messages can contain solution to some hard problem, sometimes sexual suggestions and sometimes crying back my old girlfriends. Even if it ended up to my mother.

Forget about thermal noise or quantum phenomena. Beer and vodka makes everything truly random!

Re:Fast Reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory Why some emails go unanswered

Is this an article from 2005?

[jtownatpunk.net]

I don't communicate with friends via email.

Uh-huh...

[JustAnotherIdiot]

My boss and other superiors must be my best friends in that case.

Re:Who does this?

[TWX]

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.

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.

Not about email

[cshake]

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.