Far from the eyes, close on the web: impact of geographic distance on online social interactions

Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared interest between users, but merely provide a public display of personal identity. A better picture of online social behaviour can be achieved by taking into account the intensity of communication levels between users, yielding useful insights for service providers supporting this communication. Among the several factors impacting user interactions, geographic distance might be affecting how users communicate with their friends. While spatial proximity appears influencing how people connect to each other even on the Web, the relationship between social interaction and spatial distance remains unexplored. In this work we analyse the relationship between online user interactions and geographic proximity with a detailed study of a large Spanish online social service. Our results show that while geographic distance strongly affects how social links are created, spatial proximity plays a negligible role on user interactions. These findings offer new insights on the interplay between social and spatial factors influencing online user behaviour and open new directions for future research and applications.

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