MSNMine - a Tool for Supporting Instant Messaging Research via Chat Logs
Last Updated: Thursday, 07. August 2008

MSNMine (my MSN) is a tool for mining (mine) information from MSN Messenger 6.x chat logs. This tool is built for the course project of my postgraduate module: CS5244-Digital Libraries. It is intended to assist the research of Instant Messaging (IM) usage.

To get a big overview of what is MSNMine all about, please look at Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The screenshot of the Main window of MSNMine.

Using MSNMine, you can parse your own MSN Messenger 6.x chat logs and by properly altering the Time Window filter and selecting the appropriate chat logs, you'll be able to answer the following "hard" queries:

Query 1 [Sessions]: How many chat sessions that I did for a certain Time Window? From those sessions, am I more active or passive? More specifically, I want to know, how many times do I initiate a conversation or vice versa, invited to a conversation? If I always the one who initiate the conversation with a specific guy/girl, is there is something wrong?? If this guy/girl always asks me to chat, what does this mean?? :O (Please define this yourself).

Answer: See column “Sessions”, “Total Initiator”, and “Total Invited” in Figure 1.

Query 2 [Information Exchange]: How many characters (which roughly translate to the amount of information) exchanged between me and my chat partner? More specifically, how many characters that I typed and sent (active) and how many characters that I received (passive) during my conversations?

Answer: See column “Bytes”, “Bytes Average”, “Bytes Sent”, and “Bytes Received” in Figure 1.

Query 3 [Chat Duration]: What is my average chat duration? Should I reduce my IM usage because I already chat too much on average? Who is the person that I usually chat long enough (denoted by a high chat duration/session), and what does that mean?? (Please define this yourself).

Answer: See Column “Duration” and “Average Duration/Session”.

Query 4 [Response Time]: What is the average response time (after removing some noise such as away from computer for 1 hours, etc) between each message from me to my chat partner? Does this guy/girl happy to chat with me (denoted by a very low response time) or this guy/girl is trying to avoid me by always replying my messages slowly?

Answer: See column “Average Response Time”.

Query 5 [Last Chat]: When is the last time I chat with this person? Should I start contacting again my old friends whom I have forgotten? Or do you notice that some person never online again for a long period of time, is there is something wrong with that person?? (Please define this yourself).

Answer: See column “Last Chat”.

Query 6 [My Best Online Buddies]: Who is the person I chat most with? Either based on number of sessions, number of information exchanged, or by chat duration? Is this means something? (Please define this yourself)

Answer: Compare the number of "Sessions", "Bytes", or "Duration", sort them.

Query 7 [My pattern of IM Usage]: When do I usually chat? Is it on workdays or during weekend? Is it during office hours (ehem) or during night time? How is the trend of my Instant Messaging usage now? Is it increasing or decreasing?

Answer: To answer this query, let's see on Figure 2 to 5, what MSNMine can do :)

Figure 2. Plot of your Instant Messaging usage based on hours [00.00am until 23.00pm]
This plot can tell you whether you are a nocturnal IM user or not :p. From this plot, it seems that I am a nocturnal IM user :$ (highest peak during 23pm-1am)

Figure 3. Plot of your Instant Messaging usage based on weekdays [Sunday until Saturday]
This plot can tell which day in one week that you are usually more busy (thus have no time to chat).

Figure 4. Plot of your Instant Messaging usage based on weeks [52-53 weeks in a year]
This plot can tell you the pattern of your IM usage weeks by weeks. Is it declining or increasing?

Figure 5. Plot of your Instant Messaging usage based on months [12 months in a year]
Similar to previous figure, but this one by monthly.

Query 8 [Text-based retrieval]: Which is the most frequent emoticon that I use during chatting? “:), :>, :D, :(”, etc? If I assume :) means I'm happy and “:(” means I'm sad, I want to know my emotions during a specific Time Window... Or do I ever mention this keyword key (say, some bad words) during any of my conversation?

Answer: Use the search or highlight function in MSNMine "Chat Log Content" tab :)

Figure 6. Review content of the log, do text based searching and feature to highlight all occurrences.

Query 9 [Nicknames]: What are my IM nicknames during a specific time period? Nicknames usually carry semantics… Sometimes chatters usually state their emotions, thoughts, etc in their nicknames. Can I possibly recall the list of my previous nicknames?

Answer: Click on "Nicknames" tab in MSNMine :)

Figure 7. List of your (and your chat partner's) past nicknames

Query 10: Any other thoughts of what kind of interesting queries that you like to be added on to MSNMine? email me via stevenhalim at gmail.com (replace at with @). Thanks :)

Behind the scenes.

FYI, this is the raw XML data that I process with MSNMine :).

Figure 8. Raw chat log of a simple conversation in XML format. This is how MSN save your logs

Figure 9. The above conversation in formatted version, viewed in an Internet browser

Definitions:

1. Chat Logs: The recorded text that you and your chat partner typed during a chat conversation. MSN Messenger has a built in capability to record these chat logs and saved them in XML format (which is rich of semantic).
2. MSN Messenger: A popular Instant Messaging (IM) client, the most updated version is 6.2
3. Instant Messaging: A medium of conversation in real time via Internet. Usually in text based format. User have a list of buddies. Very popular among teenagers.