Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/29869
the most natural way for people to talk about local places within cities—whether they’re telling you where they live, where they hang out with friends or where to find the best pizza. Neighborhood boundaries also are small enough to make meaningful distinctions (think Soho vs. Chelsea in New York City) but large enough to obscure exact location. Essentially, any space that’s important in daily life can be meaningful in the social-networking context. Neighborhoods are meaningful because they’re associ- ated with home and defined by the character of the people who live in them. But other spaces—those asso- ciated with schools, shopping and recreation— also are important aspects of social life. That’s why areas such as campuses, shopping districts and parks are mean- ingful social spaces that can give social-networking updates a more complete sense of place. Social Spaces and Geofencing With recent advances in hardware and software, it’s now relatively straightforward for developers to use geolocation services on smartphones to pinpoint a user’s location and display nearby POIs. Mobile plat- forms support efficient use of background apps and offer a variety of location services as part of their operating systems. Using simple radius searches and a database of POIs, mobile apps can display a list of businesses to be used as part of check-in or geotag- ging features. But this same basic approach can work just as well with geographic boundaries (geofences). A geofence is another name for a geographic bound- ary (i.e., polygon) defined by a series of latitude/longi- tude coordinates. Instead of social-networking location features simply referencing geographic points, they can leverage the growing number of geofence datasets that define social spaces. Taking it one step further, social-networking-related mobile apps can send notifications when users cross geofences (a practice called geofencing). Defining areas such as neighborhoods, campuses, shopping districts and parks as predefined geofences allows mobile applications to automatically send notifications when the following happen: • Students enter and leave campus areas • Friends move the party to a different neighborhood • Family members arrive at the mall A stream of social-networking posts that includes these types of events can give friends and followers useful information. lIn the top image, social networking posts are tied to specific places that reveal users’ exact location and don’t provide a wider geographic context. In the middle image, the same posts are tagged only to the neighborhood. In the bottom image, updates are geotagged at both levels. 24 G E O W O R L D / A P R I L 2 O 1 1 Twitter and Location Sharing Of the social-networking services, Twitter offers the most options for its users to add location to their Tweets and is one of the few currently offering social- space location sharing. Twitter’s location feature is a great example of how offering social spaces, in addi- tion to specific places, adds an important dimension to social networking. Like other social-media sites, Twitter found that its users often were adding information about where they were (either in text or with hashtags) as part of their updates. With Twitter’s 140-character limit on Tweets, Mobility/GPS Special Issue Social Networks