{"id":619,"date":"2011-07-15T18:00:42","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T18:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk\/?p=619"},"modified":"2011-07-15T18:59:49","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T18:59:49","slug":"socio-spatial-properties-of-online-social-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk\/2011\/07\/15\/socio-spatial-properties-of-online-social-networks\/","title":{"rendered":"Socio-spatial properties of online social networks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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\"<\/strong>: as described by Frances Cairncross<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

However, the recent growing popularity of location-based services such as Foursquare<\/a> and Gowalla<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

In a recent\u00c2\u00a0paper<\/a> which will appear at the upcoming\u00c2\u00a0ICWSM 2011 conference<\/a> we study the socio-spatial properties arising between users of three large-scale online location-based social networks. We discuss how\u00c2\u00a0distance still matters: individuals tend to create social ties with people living nearby much more likely than with persons further away<\/strong>, even though strong heterogeneities still appear across different users.<\/p>\n

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In fact, we discover how\u00c2\u00a0about 40% of social connections between users are shorter than 100 km, <\/strong>even though there are significant different across users, with some of them exhibiting mainly short-distance ties and others having friends at larger scales.<\/p>\n

A similar results holds for triplets of mutually connected friends: these social triangles span a wide range of geographic distances, with some of them within a couple of kilometers and others across continents<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Finally, we discuss how users with more friends tend to have social ties and social triangles on a bigger scale than people with a few connections<\/strong>. This suggests that\u00c2\u00a0the effect of spatial distance should be balanced with some notion of individual status: longer social ties will appear mainly towards important individual, while a user will connect to an unimportant one only if they are close to each other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In summary, in our work we demonstrate how<\/p>\n