WhatsApp is for family; Messenger is for friends: Communication Places in App Ecosystems

Today's users communicate via multiple apps, even when they offer almost identical functionality. We studied how and why users distribute their contacts within their app ecosystem. We found that the contacts in an app affect a user's conversations with other contacts, their communication patterns in the app, and the quality of their social relationships. Users appropriate the features and technical constraints of their apps to create idiosyncratic communication places, each with its own recursively defined membership rules, perceived purposes, and emotional connotations. Users also shift the boundaries of their communication places to accommodate changes in their contacts' behaviour, the dynamics of their relationships, and the restrictions of the technology. We argue that communication apps should support creating multiple communication places within the same app, relocating conversations across apps, and accessing functionality from other apps.

Recommended citation: Midas Nouwens, Carla F. Griggio, and Wendy E. Mackay. 2017. "WhatsApp is for family; Messenger is for friends": Communication Places in App Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 727–735. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025484 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3025453.3025484?cid=81500663869