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Mobile instant messaging (e.g., via SMS or WhatsApp) often goes along with an expectation of high attentiveness, i.e., that the receiver will notice and read the message within a few minutes. Hence, existing instant messaging services for mobile phones share indicators of availability, such as the last time the user has been online. However, in this paper we not only provide evidence that these cues create social pressure, but that they are also weak predictors of attentiveness. As remedy, we propose to share a machine-computed prediction of whether the user will view a message within the next few minutes or not. For two weeks, we collected behavioral data from 24 users of mobile instant messaging services. By the means of machine-learning techniques, we identified that simple features extracted from the phone, such as the user's interaction with the notification center, the screen activity, the proximity sensor, and the ringer mode, are strong predictors of how quickly the user will attend to the messages. With seven automatically selected features our model predicts whether a phone user will view a message within a few minutes with 70.6% accuracy and a precision for fast attendance of 81.2%
Pielot et al. (Sat,) studied this question.