Multi-level scaling properties of instant-message communications

To research the statistical properties of human’s communication behaviors is one of the highlight areas of Human Dynamics. In this paper, we analyze the instant message data of QICQ from volunteers, and discover that there are many forms of non-Poisson characters, such as inter-event distributions of sending and receiving messages, communications between two friends, log-in activities, the distribution of online time, quantities of messages, and so on. These distributions not only denote the pattern of human communication activities, but also relate to the statistical property of human behaviors in using software. We find out that most of these exponents distribute between −1 and −2, which indicates that the Instant Message (IM) communication behavior of human is different from Non-IM communication behaviors; there are many fat-tail characters related to IM communication behavior.