The Influence of Locative Media on Social Information Sharing

These days, some people can’t leave their house without their mobile phone. This device has become such an important part of our everyday life, that the barrier between the physical and virtual world is blurred. Mobile communication allows us to connect us to anybody, from any place at any time. We can be physically present at a particular place, but still be digitally connected to our friends and family. Other than supporting relationships with distant others, it can easily be used to initiate and coordinate social encounters with others in physical proximity [5]. The impact of these media became painfully clear, when in September 2012 a party that was organized through a public event on Facebook attracted 25.000 people on a very short notice and left a small town in The Netherlands ravaged when the party escalated into riots. The rise of GPS (Global Positioning System) enabled phones allows users to tag the information they share with geo-located content, most often GPS coordinates. Among the most popular geo-tagging services are Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Google Latitude and Flickr [29]. These services are called geo-social networks (GeoSNs) or locationbased social networks (LBSNs) and they allow us to combine real-time location reporting with traditional social network functionality. A possible use scenario for this type of context aware service would be, ”find all restaurants in a 500 meter radius from my current position that serve Italian food”. Other than these location-aware search queries, three design methods have become popular in community-driven systems, namely user participation, folksonomy and geotagging [2]. These methods will be discussed later on.