A Brief Journey through Foursquare User Check-ins in Cardiff

Informal talk.
Venue: FTS Seminar, Cardiff University School of Computer Science & Informatics.

Transcript

1. A brief journey through Foursquare user check-ins in Cardiff FTS 6/April/2011 Matt Williams (joint project with Martin Chorley)
2. Talk overview 1. Foursquare 2. Data collection 3. Results & visualisation 4. Tools
3. Foursquare • A “location-based online social network” • Founded in 2007 in New York • Users ‘check-in’ to their current venue • Venues are user-contributed • ‘Mayorship’ of a venue given to the user who has visited the most in two months • Points awarded for checking in
4. World Foursquare usage Text http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/01/24/2010infographic/
5. Why use Foursquare? • To meet up with friends? • For deals at your favourite venues? • ‘Life-logging’? • Embedded social gaming?
6. Why use Foursquare? • Answer: Science! • A rich dataset: • Human mobility • Geocoded venues • Social graph
7. Collection method • Problem: user check-in histories are not public (understandably!) • ...however, venues do have a “currently here” list that users can opt-in to publicly appear on • Solution: 1. collect a set of venues 2. monitor the venues in real time!
8. Data collection • Collected 4,314 venues in a 9km x 7km region • Restricted monitoring to about 2,000 venues • Began monitoring on Monday 21st March
9. Dataset summary • Collected Mon 21st March - Sat 2nd April (13 days) • 3,394 check-ins • 767 venues visited • 4.4 check-ins per venue • 716 users with check-ins • Friends per user: average 126, median 19
10. When do people check in?
11. Check-ins over time
12. How does the popularity of venues vary?
13. Top 20 venues
14. Venue popularity linear-linear plot
15. Venue popularity log-log plot
16. Where in Cardiff do check-ins occur?
17. Check-in heatmap
18. How does check-in activity vary between users?
19. Top 20 users
20. User check-ins
21. How many friends does a user have?
22. Friendships
23. Friendships among Cardiff visitors
24. [An animation of checkins!]
25. Tools • Python (important! :)) • matplotlib • Microsoft Excel • Processing • Google Earth • ffmpeg • heatmap.py (by jjguy) • www.getlatlon.com
26. Thanks! Any questions? Twitter & 4sq: @voxmjw