On Lifecycle of Interactive Web Apps in WeChat

Abstract

WeChat is the largest mobile instant messaging service in China, where users can send messages to friends or post them over their walls (a.k.a. friend circle, or WeChat Moments). Interactive web apps are quite attractive for businesses, institutes, or individuals to promote products or events. In this paper, we analyze the diffusion statistics of interactive web apps in WeChat and conduct an empirical measurement study over a dataset with 54 million users and 20 thousand web apps crawled. We discover the lifecycle of interactive web apps varies drastically, which is largely dependent on the content, date, time upon the first release, and the social influence of viewers and senders. Meanwhile, we develop a model based on the matrix factorization method to extract latent features of interactive web apps and an app lifecycle model that characterizes how the features affect apps' lifecycle, achieving the mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.32 days in predicting app's lifecycle. Our results hold the promise of helping businesses to promote their marketing information dissemination through long-lived interactive web apps at the right timing and with the appropriate content.