The focused organization theory of social ties proposes that the structure ofhuman social networks can be arranged around extra-network foci, which caninclude shared physical spaces such as homes, workplaces, restaurants, and soon. Until now, this has been difficult to investigate on a large scale, but thehuge volume of data available from online location-based social services nowmakes it possible to examine the friendships and mobility of many thousands ofpeople, and to investigate the relationship between meetings at places and thestructure of the social network. In this paper, we analyze a large dataset fromFoursquare, the most popular online location-based social network. We examinethe properties of city-based social networks, finding that they have commonstructural properties, and that the category of place where two people meet hasvery strong influence on the likelihood of their being friends. Inspired bythese observations in combination with the focused organization theory, we thenpresent a model to generate city-level social networks, and show that itproduces networks with the structural properties seen in empirical data.
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