How do people communicate through different social connections?

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison study to identify the communication patterns of people through different social connections. Advances in technology have brought many communication channels for people in daily life, like E-mail, blogs/micro-blog and mobile telecommunication etc. Now and in the future it is going to be critical that people use multiple channels of communication to reach others. The understanding of people's choice of communication channels is becoming quite important. In this paper, we specifically selected two of the most significant channels as the objects for comparison. One is online social network, e.g., Twitter as representative of such networks, and another is mobile telecommunication. The corresponding social network is therefore constructed for each communication channel. Based on that, we conduct a series of investigation, including temporal analysis, geographical analysis and topological analysis. Generally, what we have found in this study is that people's communication through different channels shows the differences in various aspects. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.