A comparison study of user behavior on Facebook and Gmail Jianqiang Shen a,⇑ , Oliver Brdiczka a , Yiye Ruan b a Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA b Department of CSE, The Ohio State University, 2015 Neil Avenue, 395 Dreese Lab, Columbus, OH 43210, USA article info Article history: Available online 27 July 2013 Keywords: Behavioral modeling Social network sites Email Comparison study abstract Email is one of the most important communication media to date, and millions of Internet users around the world spend the bulk of their time writing and reading electronic messages. The growing popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) as a communication medium motivated us to explore the relationship between user behavior on SNS and email. In this paper, we collected objective, privacy-preserved behav- ior data from participants that were both active Facebook and Gmail users. We show that a large propor- tion of social interactions still occur through email messages, while participants tend to be more emotional on Facebook. We found that producing more content on Facebook does not necessarily decrease or increase the production of emails. By utilizing the quantitative analysis of usage data instead of surveys, we show that user behavior is likely consistent across SNS and email in some aspects, for example, users with more Facebook friends seem to email to more people, Facebook and Gmail share sim- ilar trend of ‘‘happiness’’. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction As one of the most important communication media to date, email is a ubiquitous tool capturing a large share of an Internet user’s communication. Email has been widely used for communi- cation, task management, personal archiving, and contact manage- ment (Whittaker, Bellotti, & Gwizdka, 2006). It is one of the most frequently used Internet activities, given its support for asynchro- nous communication, one-to-many information exchanges, and distance-free interaction. In a survey conducted in 1998 (Wellman, Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001), researchers found that email does promote interactions, afford opportunities to bond, and increase users’ involvement in politics and voluntary organizations, though email communication supplements their face-to-face and tele- phone communication, without increasing or decreasing it. Becoming a popular form of social media, Social Network Sites (SNS) such as Facebook provide another form of computer- mediated communication. SNS users can create a profile including basic demographics, personal interest and a list of friends that a user chooses to associate with. More importantly, SNS allow a user to publish ‘‘status updates’’ (a.k.a. posts) viewable to some or all of a user’s friends. Status updates are broadcasting messages that are written for others’ consumption and usually are not tailored to a particular person. Although SNS are not necessarily on the opposite end of the spectrum compared with email, they are nevertheless a communication tool that is less private than email. While the con- tent of such undirected messages may be less intimate than that of email, they are still valuable for relationship growth and mainte- nance (Stutzman, Vitak, Ellison, Gray, & Lampe, 2010). The use of SNS increases our awareness of others’ activities. SNS facilitate interpersonal interaction and allow for the maintenance of ties that may have otherwise gone dormant (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). It may have profound implication on how we understand and interact with others. Studies have found that using Facebook can help users keep in touch with friends (Joinson, 2008), enhance their social presence, and increase their social influence (Cheung, Chiu, & Lee, 2011), while content consumption can lead to increased loneliness (Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2010). Research also found that though SNS users strive to project a positive image of themselves (Barash, Duchenaut, Isaacs, & Bellotti, 2010), their portrayed images could still be telling of their underneath charac- teristics, such as personalities (Gosling, Gaddis, & Vazire, 2007). Comparing inner behavior (also called private or covert events, such as positive and negative thinkings about a movie, or pleasant and unpleasant feelings about oneself) with outer behavior (also called public events, referring to behavior that an ordinary obser- ver could perceive) has interested researchers for a long time (Dun- can, 1971; Goffman, 2008). Connecting outer behavior with inner behavior can help us identify a person’s inner behavior and poten- tially change it, such as behavior related to suicide ideation, depression, self-esteem, and others (Calkin, 1992; Kubina, Haertel, & Cooper, 1994; Clore & Gaynor, 2006; Calkin, 2009). It can also help precision teaching by profiling a person’s inner behavior and applying the most necessary help (Calkin, 2009). Previously researchers relied on self-recording to carry out research on inner 0747-5632/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.06.043 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 650 812 4428. E-mail addresses: jianqiang.shen@parc.com (J. Shen), oliver.brdiczka@parc.com (O. Brdiczka), ruan@cse.ohio-state.edu (Y. Ruan). Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013) 2650–2655 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh