Ultradian, circadian, and circaseptan rhythms in the patterns of usage of Facebook messenger

• Published in: Biological rhythm research Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 341 - 349
• Main Authors: Diwan, Ananya, Kumar Swain, Rakesh, Minz, Sarojini, Parganiha, Arti, Pati, Atanu Kumar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis 01.02.2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Activity patterns; biological rhythms; circadian; Circadian rhythm; Circadian rhythms; circaseptan; harmonic curve fitting; patterns in FBM usage; Synchronization; TCA; time series analysis; Ultradian; Ultradian rhythms
• ISSN: 0929-1016; 1744-4179; 1744-4179
• DOI: 10.1080/09291016.2020.1747741

The Facebook Messenger (FBM) is one of the most popular instant messaging social apps, launched by Facebook in 2010. As of October 2019, there were about 1.3 billion FBM users worldwide. In this study, we analyzed periodicities in the online activity patterns of users in FBM. We did not recruit any subjects in this study; rather four of us used our own FBM accounts to reveal the presence of any rhythms with τ = 12 h or τ = 24 h or τ = 168 h in the patterns FBM usage among our FB friends. We log-transformed the time series data and subjected those to Cosinor rhythmometry. The peaks in the daily pattern of FBM usages, revealed from Cosinor analyses, and harmonics curve fittings validated the presence of multi-frequency rhythms in the longitudinal time-series data captured over a period of 16 days. The underlying basis of the observed multi-frequency rhythms could be attributed to the phenomenon of social synchronization. The current findings might bear commercial applications with special reference to targeted content advertising (TCA).