ABSTRACT
Identifying and understanding the emerging patterns in user activity is an important step in designing and developing features for online social networks. With the explosive growth of user-generated data in such networks, the recorded user activities are no more sparse snapshots but are close to a live reflection of real life. This allows us to extract patterns which are tied to the time and space context of real life activity from such recorded data. In this work, we analyze two rich datasets obtained from two major location-based social networks (Foursquare and Gowalla) and show how users change their activity patterns depending on the country they currently reside on. We also compare activity patterns between foreign users from different countries and local users. The detailed results may not automatically generalize but this kind of analysis can be repeated on different datasets and the outcomes of such analyses can benefit social and behavioral scientists as well as designers of online social media.
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Index Terms
Country-level spatial dynamics of user activity: a case study in location-based social networks
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