Event-based social networks: Linking the online and offline social worlds

Abstract

Newly emerged event-based online social services, such as Meetup and Plancast, have experienced increased popularity and rapid growth. From these services, we observed a new type of social network - event-based social network (EBSN). An EBSN does not only contain online social interactions as in other conventional online social networks, but also includes valuable offline social interactions captured in offline activities. By analyzing real data collected from Meetup, we investigated EBSN properties and discovered many unique and interesting characteristics, such as heavy-tailed degree distributions and strong locality of social interactions. We subsequently studied the heterogeneous nature (co-existence of both online and offline social interactions) of EBSNs on two challenging problems: community detection and information flow. We found that communities detected in EBSNs are more cohesive than those in other types of social networks (e.g. location-based social networks). In the context of information flow, we studied the event recommendation problem. By experimenting various information diffusion patterns, we found that a community-based diffusion model that takes into account of both online and offline interactions provides the best prediction power. This paper is the first research to study EBSNs at scale and paves the way for future studies on this new type of social network. A sample dataset of this study can be downloaded from http://www.largenetwork.org/ebsn. © 2012 ACM.