Database Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Mobility and Geo-Social Networks
Laura Spinsanti, Michele Berlingerio, and Luca Pappalardo
16.1 Introduction
The social web is changing the way people create and use information. Every
day millions of pieces of information are shared through the medium of several
online social networks and online services with a social layer such as Facebook,
Google+, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on. People have discovered a new way to
exploit their sociality: from work to entertainment, from new participatory jour-
nalism to religion, from global to local government, from disaster management
to market advertisement, from personal status update to milestone family events,
the trend is to be social. Information or content is shared by users through the
web by posting images or videos, blogging or micro-blogging, surveying and
updating geographic information, or playing geographic-based games. Consid-
ering the increase in mobile Internet access through smartphones and the number
of available (geo-) social media platforms, we can expect the amount of infor-
mation to continuously grow in the near future. To understand the potential of
this change it is worth noticing the amount of “geo-social information” produced
during recent years to be a daily occurrence. The following are just few exam-
ples. In August 2006, Flickr introduced the geo-tagging feature; by 2007, more
than 20 million geo-tagged photos were uploaded to Flickr. In August 2011,
Flickr announced its 6 billionth photo, with an increase of 20% year-on-year
over the last 5 years.
1
Similarly, Twitter was born in 2006. The most impressive
performance indicator is the increasing rate of messages. In 2010, the average
number of Tweets sent per day was 50 million
2
while in March 2012 it has
increased to 340 million.
3
In 2010, the geo-tagging feature was added to Twit-
ter. Even considering that the amount of geo-enabled messages is only around
1
Source:
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/08/04/6000000000/
2
Source:
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html
3
Source:
http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/twitter-turns-six.html
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