Speed of potential cooperation via SMS texting smartmobs?

[Mark Elliott]

Has anyone come across any research on average SMS text message response time - that is, the average time it takes for someone to respond to an SMS text message (not the technical potential speed, but the social speed)?

Just curious as it seems like it would be an interesting indicator regarding speed of potential cooperation via SMS smartmob networks...

Thoughts?
Mark


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Mark Elliott, PhD
Director, CollabForge pty ltd
collaboration ~ mass collaboration ~ social software
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[Howard Rheingold]

I asked Rich Ling, Telenor researcher who really knows the field, if he knows who might be measuring this. Astute question, Mark!

Howard Rheingold how...@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold

http://www.rheingold.com  http://www.smartmobs.com

http://vlog.rheingold.com

what it is ---> is --->up to us

[Nancy McClure]

this study has a short section on the immediacy of recognition, and begins to allude to the impact upon social response. No hard metrics, but could lead you to more...

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/publications/CHI2006-kptang-workshop-chi2006.pdf

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[Mark Elliott]

Thanks Howard and Nancy! - from the article upon first scan:

...SMS and mobile IM messages seem to hold a much stricter timetable [than instant messaging].  Almost all participants indicated a punctual 5-15 minutes response time at replying to messages they receive.  They expect similar response time for messages that they send out, so much so that most of them claimed that they would follow-up with a second message or phone call, if no response was given within 2 hours. 

Also of note:

All participants responded that they almost always immediately notice the notification and immediately
respond by reading the SMS/mobile IM message. In contrast, participants indicated they are more likely to negotiate their response time when dealing with desktop/laptop IM messages, leading to longer delays before reading the message. 

As many of you probably are aware of, here in Australia, in my state Victoria, we had some pretty horrendous bushfires (forest fires) - many lives lost, completely unprecedented fire dynamics etc. My consultancy is providing advice and strategy to emergency services bodies regarding options for enabling smart mobs via social media, SMS and other distributed communications which got me wondering about response time.

It's interesting to think about the network effects of cascading responses, each taking 5-15 minutes - which actually adds up to sizable delays. However this doesn't take into consideration sending messages to groups, or even how many individual messages might be sent out after receiving one high priority / important message - which could create exponentially growing cascades of recipents.

Of course a major problem we had with the last fires was that mobile/cell phone coverage went down in effected areas as cell towers were consumed in the fires...

[Nancy McClure]

along similar public-notification lines, I use the Twitter service www.twitter.com, and follow SFBART which sends out light rail timetable delay status reports that would be wholly ineffective if they were sent to me via email. 

[Mark Elliott]

Yeah, we had some good Twitter action during the fires (Twitter has got loads of potential in this area). A great example being @cfa_updates which was set up by a citizen to scrape and provide fire updates for those in the field via mobile devices. We've set up a ning to discuss some of these ideas and the story told by Dean about his experience with setting up @cfa_updates and running it during the fires is a great read. See this thread (in reverse chron order): http://victorianbushfirenetwork.ning.com/group/emergencyservicessocialmedia

[Howard Rheingold]

Search Twitter for "earthquake" today and you will see hundreds of responses during the first minute after the quake.

Howard Rheingold how...@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold

http://www.rheingold.com  http://www.smartmobs.com

http://vlog.rheingold.com

what it is ---> is --->up to us

[Mark Elliott]

The same thing happened with a quake in Melbourne last week - even thought it was very small and local, there was loads of twitter action.

[Paul B. Hartzog]

Sam and I can do instant visualizations of this data

(for example, see here
http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/blog/local-food-systems-web-and-network-architecture-local-food-systems)

if anyone is interested and/or willing to help out, please let us know

thx
-p

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[Mark Elliott]

Wow, that's a great idea. I'll keep it in mind for further development - I'm sure there's an application for this lurking round in my sphere...

Thanks for sharing!
Mark