Investigating the Characteristics of the Response Waiting Time in a Chat Room

Chat rooms are of enormous interest to social network researchers as they are one of the most interactive internet areas. Chat room users’ behaviour is important because it has an effect on the structure of a social network. To understand the user’s behaviour dynamics, researchers analyse the user’s Response Waiting Time (RWT) based on traditional approaches of aggregating the network contacts. However, real social networks are dynamic and properties such as RWT change over time. So the traditional approaches tend to neglect the dynamism in pair conversation and the result may misrepresent the real nature of user’s RWT during the on-line chat. We studied the dynamics of pairs of people in online conversation through RWT. Using three online chat logs: Walford, IRC and T-REX, we analyse, compare and presented the true nature of RWT of pairs of people in conversation. Our research shows that the distribution of the Response Waiting Time (RWT) of pairs in conversation exhibits multi-scaling behaviour, which significantly affects the current views on the nature of RWT. This is a shift from simple power-law distribution to a more complex pattern. Previous studies on user’s RWT between pairs of people claim that the RWT has a simple power-law distribution with an exponent of 1. However, our research shows that multi-scaling behaviour and the exponent has a wider range of values which depend on the environment and time of day. Secondly, we investigated the impact of communication count (number of messages exchanged between pairs of people) on RWT, the result shows that pairs who have a high number of messages exchange within an online chat room tend to have a shorter RWT. Lastly, we studied the RWT dynamics of one user in relation to other participants when in pair conversation. Our result shows that an individual can have several waiting time depending on the interference factors. This suggests that communication dynamics depends on the group or pairs rather than being simply about the individual.