The social connections people form online affect the quality of information they receive and their online experience. Although a host of socioeconomic and cognitive factors were implicated in the formation of offline social ties, few of them have been empirically validated, particularly in an online setting. In this study, we analyze a large corpus of geo-referenced messages, or tweets, posted by social media users from a major US metropolitan area. We linked these tweets to US Census data through their locations. This allowed us to measure emotions expressed in the tweets posted from an area, the structure of social connections, and also use that area's socioeconomic characteristics in analysis. We extracted the structure of online social interactions from the people mentioned in tweets from that area. We find that at an aggregate level, places where social media users engage more deeply with less diverse social contacts are those where they express more negative emotions, like sadness and anger. Demographics also has an impact: these places have residents with lower household income and education levels. Conversely, places where people engage less frequently but with diverse contacts have happier, more positive messages posted from them and also have better educated, younger, more affluent residents. Results suggest that cognitive factors and offline characteristics affect the quality of online interactions. Our work highlights the value of linking social media data to traditional data sources, such as US Census, to drive novel analysis of online behavior.
@cite_19: We present a large-scale study of user behavior in Foursquare, conducted on a dataset of about 700 thousand users that spans a period of more than 100 days. We analyze user checkin dynamics, demonstrating how it reveals meaningful spatio-temporal patterns and offers the opportunity to study both user mobility and urban spaces. Our aim is to inform on how scientific researchers could utilise data generated in Location-based Social Networks to attain a deeper understanding of human mobility and how developers may take advantage of such systems to enhance applications such as recommender systems.
@cite_1: Location-sharing services have a long history in research, but have only recently become available for consumers. Most popular commercial location-sharing services differ from previous research efforts in important ways: they use manual 'check-ins' to pair user location with semantically named venues rather than tracking; venues are visible to all users; location is shared with a potentially very large audience; and they employ incentives. By analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with foursquare users and 47 survey responses, we gained insight into emerging social practices surrounding location-sharing. We see a shift from privacy issues and data deluge, to more performative considerations in sharing one's location. We discuss performance aspects enabled by check-ins to public venues, and show emergent, but sometimes conflicting norms (not) to check-in.
@cite_7: People's willingness to share where they are, what they are doing and with whom using location-based technology has led to the emergence of applications which are being used to create new ways to represent and navigate space. One of the most popular applications in this area is Foursquare. In this paper we report the results of a short ethnographic study of the use of Foursquare in East London, combined with further analysis using the developer site to acquire data in order to investigate findings further. We describe how the Foursquare community appropriates the relatively simple communication capabilities of the application to develop their own informal rules of interaction. This behaviour is important to both application designers and businesses using social networking sites to reach and engage with consumers. Specifically we argue that tips are used for more than the intended purpose of commenting on a venue and that mayorships are a vehicle for cheating the leaderboard. We conclude by noting that designing functions to fulfill a specific purpose in media space offers no guarantee that the community will use them solely for the intended purpose.
A number of innovative research works attempted to better understand human emotion and mobility. Some of these works focuses on geo-tagged location data extracted from Foursquare and Twitter. Researchers reported @cite_1 @cite_19 that Foursquare users usually check-in at venues they perceived as more interesting and express actions similar to other social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare check-ins are, in many cases, biased: while some users provide important feedback by checking-in at venues and share their engagement, others subvert the rules by deliberately creating unofficial duplicate and nonexistent venues @cite_7 .