Ars Technica has picked up on some interesting research releated to text messaging and its applications for the ways that cellular networks can be managed:
Human communication patterns, particularly in the form of text messages, appear to follow a pattern that's a fusion of two mathematical models. In a paper published in PNAS on Monday, researchers analyzed a large set of text messages from service providers and found most users trade over 90 percent of their messages in bursts with only one other person, followed by an exponential drop into silence. The pattern may be due to interplay between the number and priority of tasks the two parties are trying to accomplish together, and the math behind them may help service providers manage their resources.
Scientists have lately been swimming in human communication data, from emails to texts and phone calls. As more and more people get cell phones and computers, all this information is begging to be analyzed for the benefit of mobile and Internet service providers, not to mention for its value as a wider indicator of human behavior.
To see if they could identify a communication pattern, a group of researchers culled data on text messages from three different mobile service companies over the course of a month. Specifically, they were interested in the length of time between messages, and wanted to know if there is a typical pace.
When they looked at the data, they noticed that 50 percent of users send 90 percent of their text messages to the same person. Since this covered a large chunk of all the text message business, they used this subset to see how time between messages was distributed.
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