Socio-spatial properties of online social networks

Some social scientists have suggested that the advent of fast long-distance travel and cheap online communication tools might have caused the "death of distance": as described by Frances Cairncross, the world appears shrinking as individuals connect and interact with each other regardless of the geographic distances which separates them. Unfortunately, the lack of reliable geographic data about large-scale social networks has hampered research on this specific problem.

However, the recent growing popularity of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla has unlocked large-scale access to where people live and who their friends are, making possible to understand how distance and friendship ties relate to each other.

In a recent paper which will appear at the upcoming ICWSM 2011 conference we study the socio-spatial properties arising between users of three large-scale online location-based social networks. We discuss how distance still matters: individuals tend to create social ties with people living nearby much more likely than with persons further away, even though strong heterogeneities still appear across different users.