Title
The Lifecycle and Cascade of WeChat Social Messaging Groups.
Abstract
Social instant messaging services are emerging as a transformative form with which people connect, communicate with friends in their daily life they catalyze the formation of social groups, and they bring people stronger sense of community and connection. However, research community still knows little about the formation and evolution of groups in the context of social messaging their lifecycles, the change in their underlying structures over time, and the diffusion processes by which they develop new members. In this paper, we analyze the daily usage logs from WeChat group messaging platform the largest standalone messaging communication service in China with the goal of understanding the processes by which social messaging groups come together, grow new members, and evolve over time. Specifically, we discover a strong dichotomy among groups in terms of their lifecycle, and develop a separability model by taking into account a broad range of group-level features, showing that long-term and short-term groups are inherently distinct. We also found that the lifecycle of messaging groups is largely dependent on their social roles and functions in users' daily social experiences and specific purposes. Given the strong separability between the long-term and short-term groups, we further address the problem concerning the early prediction of successful communities. In addition to modeling the growth and evolution from group-level perspective, we investigate the individual-level attributes of group members and study the diffusion process by which groups gain new members. By considering members' historical engagement behavior as well as the local social network structure that they embedded in, we develop a membership cascade model and demonstrate the effectiveness by achieving AUC of 95.31% in predicting inviter, and an AUC of 98.66% in predicting invitee.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2872427.2882979
WWW
Keywords
Field
DocType
social messaging, online community, group formation, information diffusion
Social group,World Wide Web,Online community,Social network,Transformative learning,Instant messaging,Computer science,Sense of community
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.90
27
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiezhong Qiu126812.48
Yixuan Li21709.46
Jie Tang35871300.22
zheng lu4211.24
hao ye5211.58
Bo Chen6232.64
Qiang Yang717039875.69
John Hopcroft842451836.70