This has included work across various countries, including Finland ( ?), Norway ( ?), the United Kingdom ( ?) and the United States ( ?). Due to popularity amongst teenagers, many studies have focused on their usage patterns.
Studies of Messaging There have been a large number of studies exploring user behaviour regarding messaging. Hence, a careful selection of seed groups is paramount for meaningful results. However, we also find that diversity amongst groups is high (both in terms of activity levels, geography and topics covered). We conclude that collecting large-scale public messaging data with WhatsApp is feasible, and one can obtain a broad geographical coverage (§ 5). We particularly focus on exploring the potential, as well as the biases we see in the dataset. With this data, we then proceed to perform a basic characterisation, outlining its key trends (§ 4). We then describe our data collection methodology, which involves scraping a list of public WhatsApp groups, subscribing to them, and then monitoring them such that all communications can be imported into an easy-to-use schema (§ 3). Our dataset therefore constitutes the first large-scale public WhatsApp data source. We begin by presenting related studies that have either focussed on WhatsApp or messaging services more generally (§ 2).ĭue to the difficulty in data collection, most of these studies rely on qualitative methods and interviews/surveys. More generally, although past studies have investigated WhatsApp usage via methodologies such as interviews ( ?), we believe it is important to perform both large-scale and data-driven analyses of its usage. These are openly accessible groups, frequently publicised on well known websites, 1 1 1For example, and typically themed around particular topics, like politics, football, music, etc. This constitutes a radical shift from the bilateral nature of SMS.Īs such, we argue that these public WhatsApp groups warrant study in their own right. This is confirmed in social studies that have found that WhatsApp tends to be used in a more conversational and informal manner amongst close social circles ( ?).Ī particularly novel aspect of WhatsApp messaging is its close integration with public groups. However, its group functionality and easy integration of multimedia content indicates that usage may differ significantly from these other platforms, particularly SMS. Indeed, its popularity far exceeds more traditional messaging services likes Skype ( ?). This suggests that a major portion of online interactions take place via WhatsApp.
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