Analyzing the Proximity and Interactions of Friends in Communities in Gowalla

We collected friendship information and location data from a social media website called Gowalla to analyze the relationship between geographical space and friendship. First, we analyzed how geographic proximity shapes the structure of the social network by limiting joined activities among distant users. Second, we incorporated information about geographic locations that users visited into three selected community detection algorithms (Clique Percolation Method, Inference Algorithm, and GANXiS) to detect friendship communities where members are on average separated by one friendship link and also likely to be close to each other geographically. Third, we proposed a technique to generate covers of fixed sizes by using a combination of social and geographic information for the purpose of comparing them to communities detected by the selected algorithms. Finally, we used community quality measurements based on friendship link connectivity and geographic locations visited by users to examine detected communities.