College would be nothing without our classic friend group-text. It defined us for a few about a year (at least until we had to make a new one for Lefko). So, now that it is extinct, I thought it would be interesting to dive a little deeper and grab some data.

The beginning

Who started it all? Well me of course. A log of the first few messages is below:

Davis - "Test"

Davis - "Yay iMessage!"

Joanna - "Hiii"

Joanna - "Omg I'm back in the club!!!!!"

Joanna - "How are finals everyone??? Good luck to everyone who has some left!"

Joanna - "Thanks Davis for making a new one for me wowza"

Mehul - "Game Changer"

Joanna - "Yesh"

Natalie - "WOOOO"

Texts Sent

Major props to Adil for being the biggest contributor to the group text.

Since the first text was sent on 2014-12-14 00:51:12, and we stopped really using this group text around December, 2015, this represents an approximate rate of 2.29 texts/hour. Not bad!

If we turn this into gender based data, we get the following. In total, the guys send 2.58 times as many texts as the girls, whereas the "Guys Expectation" would be 1.33 times as many, given there are 4 guys to 3 girls. Girls - we want to hear more from you!

A histogram of our overall texts can be found below:

Text Length

How long were each of our texts? Overall, theres surprisingly little variability in average message length!

But, maybe if we expand out each person's length distributions, there will be a little bit more of a difference?

It seems not. Aside from my huge text message length variability (likely partially due to my longest text - thats coming up), we're pretty even across the board.

Word Clouds

But, what kind of texts are people actually sending? These word clouds may shed some light (please excuse the few strange looking characters, those are improperly stored emojis). Personal favorites include the fact that I evidently say "Real quick" a lot, Natalie's inclusion of "gosh", and Brian's prevalent "BABY".

Adil's Words

Amy's Words

Brian's Words

Davis's Words

Joanna's Words

Mehul's Words

Natalie's Words

The longest text?

Davis saying "0 to 100 real quick" 485 times in a row, in a single text.

What about the most question marks in a single text?

Brian wins that one, with the following text:

??????????????

Question Marks Galore

Speaking of question marks, just how interrogative is each of us?

From this data, we can glean that the girls are ever so slightly more interrogative, sending ~7% more question marks/text than the guys.

But what about exclamations?

Don't worry Joanna, I know you wanted to see this.

Its incredible how stark the contrast between Brian and Joanna really is - Joanna sends 35.3 times as many exclamation marks as Brian. In total, Joanna sent 33.74% of all exclamation marks in the group text, despite sending only 12.4% of texts.

The group text brings the "lols"

Who likes who?

Below are charts showing who says each person's name the most (note the very different scales).

Who's the most self-referential? Joanna said her own name 44 times. Joanna also takes the honor of being the overall most referenced person, with 23.4% of all mentions going to her. Natalie, I'm sorry to say you were the least referenced overall, capturing only 6% of references.

What about emojis?

The emoji data for stored texts seems a little off, so this may not be 100% accurate, but at least it shows the trend :).

The Biggest Potty Mouth

As expected, Natalie and Amy are #angels. Overall, the boys send ~6 times as many bad words as the girls do. Adil, your number would be higher if I included your various adil-spellings.

That's it!

I wanted to do more date related queries (For instance, who is the person most likely to respond to each other person), but the iMessage database was giving me an inordinate amount of trouble doing that. Maybe I'll figure it out eventually.

Anyways, hope y'all enjoyed!