Several weeks ago, my student Reto Hodel who I’m supervising currently published a really cool and easy-to-use Web application that lets you find new potentially interesting locations such as bars, restaurants or clubs based on their social relationships within the Facebook community. In other words, your recommendations are generated depending on your friends, your different participating n-cliques, your explicit and implicit trusted trendsetters and other social network analysis based metrics. This Social Network-based location recommender system is called spotting.

In this master thesis, he built a Web applications that uses the people’s Social Network at Facebook to generate the location recommendations. Based on the data gathered by the Web application we analyze what SNA metrics are suitable for generating such recommendations. We are still investigating this research questions. As soon we get som e more insights we plan to add them to the Web application such that people can benefit from better recommendations.

If you are interest in having a look into the Web application then please just check out the following link:
http://seal.ifi.uzh.ch/spotting

You may want to join the spotting group at Facebook. So far, we only provide locations from Zurich.

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