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 them through multiple online identifiers (IDs), and interact with each other in both the cyberspace and the physical world. These two kinds of interactions are highly relevant to 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 interactions when people come across each other. By analyzing real data collected from a mainstream ISP in China, which contains 32.7 million IDs across most popular web services, we build a large-scale CLSN, and evaluate its unique properties. The results verify that the CLSN is quite different from existing online and offline social networks in terms of different classic graph metrics. This paper is the first research to study CLSN at scale and paves the way for future studies of this new type of social network.