Research identifies two distinct groups of email users

A team at Yahoo Research has come out with a new classification to categorize computer users by the way they use their email. Small worlds expert Duncan Watts and his team conducted a study of some 3,000 individuals at a European university, over an 83-day period, monitoring the time of day they sent emails. In addition, the team examined the email habits of over 122,000 email users at a U.S. university over a period of two years.

It is not clear if the dataset would be similar to people in the workplace, though I would be surprised if there was much difference. The first group was termed "day laborers," who tend to send out emails within the normal working day between 9am and 6pm. The "emailaholics" on the other hand, tend to send emails throughout their waking hours--from 9am until an hour past midnight.

Seventy-five percent of users stayed within the same group over the 2-year period. The practical implication of this finding is still unclear; though the incorporation of this trait into spam filtering was suggested. Now if they will only do a similar study for Facebook and Twitter users. What kind of email user would you classify yourself as anyway?

To read more about the research titled "Characterizing Individual Communication Patterns," head over at the arXiv.org site.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Technology Review

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