Co-Location Social Networks: Linking the Physical World and Cyberspace

Abstract

Various dedicated web services in the cyberspace, e.g., social networks, e-commerce, and instant communications, play a significant role in people’s daily-life. Billions of people around the world access these services through multiple online identifiers (IDs), and interact with each other in both the cyberspace and the physical world. Thanks to the rapid development of wireless and mobile technologies, nowadays these two kinds of interactions are highly relevant with each other. In order to link between the cyberspace and the physical world, we propose a new type of social network, i.e., co-location social network (CLSN). A CLSN contains online IDs describing people’s online presence and offline “encountering” events when people come across each other. By analyzing real data collected from a mainstream ISP in China, which contains 32.7 million IDs across the most popular web services, we build a large-scale CLSN, and explore its unique properties from various aspects. The results indicate that the CLSN is quite different from existing online and offline social networks in terms of classic graph metrics. Moreover, we propose a community-based user identification algorithm to find all online IDs belonging to the same physical user. Using some ground-truth data, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves a high accuracy in user identification. Finally, we perform a user-centric analysis, and we demonstrate the behavioral difference among different types of users.