"Beyond the social web: the geo-social revolution" by Salvatore Scellato with Ching-man Au Yeung as Coordinator

Abstract

While in the last years massive online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have become extremely popular, gathering and engaging millions of users, only recently the widespread adoption of mobile devices has led to a large portion of users continuously using these social services during their daily lives. These devices offer geolocation capabilities: the ability to share your location, to generate location-tagged information and to search for it adds a crucial spatial dimension to online social networking. As a result, online social services are increasingly becoming location-aware, allowing users to create and access information about their geographic whereabouts: the trend is progressively going from specialized providers offering location-as-a-service to a widespread new concept of location-as-a-feature , where every online social platform integrates geographic information into their services. This provides broad and plentiful data to investigate how spatial and social structure blend together, opening exciting research directions with promising scientific and practical applications. In this article I will present how the socio-spatial properties of online social networks can be studied and how novel geo-social network measures can be defined to blend together social and spatial properties. The availability of geographic data, together with the rising importance of mobile devices, is likely to transform the Web and how it is used by billions of people every day.