Understanding User Behavior of Asking Location-Based Questions on Microblogs

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith the prevalence of mobile social network services, people can post location-based questions on their social networks to satisfy their needs anytime anywhere. In this article, the authors study location-based questions that people post on microblogs, which is a popular form of social network service. The authors collected posts with geo-tags from Sina Weibo and conducted the study based on about a thousand location-based questions. Their results reveal unique characteristics of location-based questions by analyzing what people ask, how they ask, why they ask, and the context when asking. Location-based questions are closely related to people’s offline activities. Spatial restriction, subjectivity, interactivity, and propagation are the main characteristics that people value for choosing social networks to ask location-based questions. People also apply different phrasing skills to different types of questions. The questions people ask in different contexts also have different focuses. Based on their findings, the authors discuss practical design implications for social networks, location-based Q&A systems, and other applications with location-based features.