Understanding user behavior at scale in a mobile video chat application

Lei Tian, Shaosong Li, Junho Ahn, David Chu, Richard Han, Qin Lv, Shivakant Mishra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Online video chat services such as Chatroulette and Omegle randomly match users in video chat sessions and have become increasingly popular, with tens of thousands of users online at anytime during a day. Our interest is in examining user behavior in the growing domain of mobile video, and in particular how users behave in such video chat services as they are extended onto mobile clients. To date, over four thousand people have downloaded and used our Android based mobile client, which was developed to be compatible with an existing video chat service. The paper provides a first-ever detailed large scale study of mobile user behavior in a random video chat service over a three week period. This study identifies major characteristics such as mobile user session durations, time of use, demographic distribution and the large number of brief sessions that users click through to find good matches. Through content analysis of video and audio, as well as analysis of texting and clicking behavior, we discover key correlations among these characteristics, e.g., normal mobile users are highly correlated with using the front camera and with the presence of a face, whereas misbehaving mobile users have a high negative correlation with the presence of a face.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUbiComp 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages647-656
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)9781450317702
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2013 - Zurich, Switzerland
Duration: 8 Sept 201312 Sept 2013

Publication series

NameUbiComp 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

Conference

Conference2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2013
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityZurich
Period8/09/1312/09/13

Keywords

  • Mobile video chat
  • Behavior analysis
  • Effective matching
  • Misbehavior detection

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Understanding user behavior at scale in a mobile video chat application'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this