Institute for Software Research
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Bridging the Gap Between
Physical Location and Online Social Networks
Justin Cranshaw, Eran Toch
Jason Hong, Aniket Kittur, Norman Sadeh
March 2010
An expanded version of this work appeared in the
Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference
on Ubiquitous Computing
Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2010
This paper examines the location traces of 489 users of a location sharing
social network for relationships between the users' mobility patterns and
structural properties of their underlying social network. We introduce a
novel set of location-based features for analyzing the social context of a
geographic region, including location entropy, which measures the diversity of
unique visitors of a location. Using these features, we provide a model for
predicting friendship between two users by analyzing their location trails.
Our model achieves significant gains over simpler models based only on direct
properties of the co-location histories, such as the number of co-locations.
We also show a positive relationship between the entropy of the locations the
user visits and the number of social ties that user has in the network. We
discuss how the offline mobility of users can have implications for both
researchers and designers of online social networks.
23 pages
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