"They studied the messaging habits of 100,000 Facebook users by zip code"
This skews the study substantially. My facebook friends are my old classmates, colleagues, family and friends. Most of them are people that live close to where I do.
My e-mail habits are very different. Businesswise I probably correspond with more people abroad than in my own country.
The sample determines the output - and in this case the sample isn't representative of all online communications.
The sample is also much smaller than the article suggests. The paper itself says they found about 1800 'linked pairs' of users with a stated ZIP code in that sample of 100K. And in the graphs for the larger (4500) sample of email data, the fit is quite bad, with a pronounced 'hump' in the tail. There are just far too few sample points here to make these kinds of sweeping conclusions.
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"They studied the messaging habits of 100,000 Facebook users by zip code"
This skews the study substantially. My facebook friends are my old classmates, colleagues, family and friends. Most of them are people that live close to where I do.
My e-mail habits are very different. Businesswise I probably correspond with more people abroad than in my own country.
The sample determines the output - and in this case the sample isn't representative of all online communications.
The sample is also much smaller than the article suggests. The paper itself says they found about 1800 'linked pairs' of users with a stated ZIP code in that sample of 100K. And in the graphs for the larger (4500) sample of email data, the fit is quite bad, with a pronounced 'hump' in the tail. There are just far too few sample points here to make these kinds of sweeping conclusions.