Google Hangouts

Google lets you export your account data. This includes Bookmarks, Calendar, and Hangouts. The Hangouts data is provided in a JSON file. Only a little bit of that is the message itself and the time. I thought of doing some things with the JSON in PowerShell, but Jay2k1 has written a great web tool that will convert that JSON into HTML, XLSX, or TXT. Just like that, all the data was in a nice Excel file for me to work with.
I’ll display some results from my Engineering 100 group at UM Dearborn. We designed and built a drawbridge that would open when a train comes by. This was just for the fall semester, so messages were from October to December.

Between 10 and 12 was when most of us had time between classes. We got a lot done late in the day as well.

We had a flurry of chats at the start of the project and at the end.

Chat activity wasn’t constant, of course. Someone would bring something up, everyone would respond, and then things would be quiet until someone started the conversation again. Who broke the silence most often? For each message I saw if the time since the last message had been more than an hour. If it was, the value in the cell was set to the person who sent the message. If it wasn’t, the cell just said the message was shorter than an hour. I used a Pivot Table to count up all those cell values.

The most popular message length was two characters: lots of “ok” and “ya”.

If a picture was sent instead of text, the message is exported as the URL to the picture. The URL always starts with “https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/” so I was able to have a column that determined if a message was a picture or not.