Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
correlation with intercity Twitter ties while the network falls into sub-graphs
characterized by regions, country borders and language usage.
Although there are already many outcomes and assumptions on the spatial
structure of OSNs, several questions arise regarding their particularities especially
on detailed level of information. This all naturally is originated from the novelty of
the topic. Additionally, up-to-now only few cartographic representations were
published on local network connections and topologies, therefore geovisualisation
of the spatial distribution of online social network connections provides new
insights on understanding cyberspace geographies.
Database Characteristics: The Case of iWiW
We have chosen iWiW (International Who Is Who), the largest Hungarian online
social network in order to visualise and to analyse the relationship between virtual
and real world geographies. The iWiW was launched in April 2002 and shortly
became the most known SNS in Hungary and even the most visited national website
in 2006. The number of users was limited in the first years but started to grow
exponentially due to new functions introduced in 2005 (e.g. personal advertise-
ments, picture upload, public lists of friends, town-classification, e-mail box etc).
The system had 640,000 members with 35 million connections in April 2006, when
Origo Ltd. (member of the Hungarian Telecom group) became the owner of the site.
The number of registered users continued to rise afterwards; it counted for 1.5
million users in December 2006, more than 3.5 million users in October and
exceeded 4 million in December of 2008, however, the number hardly increased
since then. In 2013 the total number of registered users is around 4.7 million.
The competition among SNSs favours Facebook in Hungary as well. Though
Hungarian Facebook users reached the level of 3 million in late 2011 only,
Facebook
s market share is growing dynamically and stagnating iWiW is fore-
casted to fail. For example, Facebook outnumbered iWiW in terms of daily visitors
in October 2010. However, iWiW still has higher number of registered users, which
provided a better approach in our case for demonstrating the role of geographical
location and physical distance in network connections.
The following analysis is based on a data collection for January 2013. This
database indicated the number of connections and the sum of users for an aggre-
gated level of Hungarian settlements, as well as the number of intra- and intercity
connections. This second one was later used to create settlement-to-settlement
connectivity matrix.
The original individual level data were basically aspatial, which had to be
therefore geographically located to perform cartographic and spatial analysis. We
have processed user profile data for geolocalization. However, localization of users
based on profile information is considered to be problematic in papers focusing on
OSN user and social media content localization (Hecht et al.
2011
). In iWiW,
however, it is compulsory to choose location from a scroll-down menu when
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