LBSN 2010 workshop report

Abstract

Social networking services have become very popular in recent years, especially among younger people. While many people still sit behind a desktop computer to upload photos, write blogs and communicate with friends in the virtual world, an increasing trend enabled by the development of wireless networks and location sensing technologies is to track and share personal location information on the fly with mobile devices. By adding a location dimension, social networking has now been brought from the virtual world back to real life and our real-life experiences can be shared in the virtual world in a convenient fashion. We define Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) as social networking services where people can track and share location-related information with each other, via either mobile or desktop computers. As location is one of the most important aspects in people's everyday lives, a lot of novel application scenarios can be supported by LBSN, e.g., trustworthy location recommendations can be collected and shared within LBSN and used to rank interesting locations, discover new places, people and activities.