Data Science Day @ Columbia University

This paper studies social network users’ geographic patterns by comparing Twitter and Flickr’s user distributions through the New York City. Twitter users’ locations are more widely-spread across the city than Flickr photos’ locations. Cluster patterns are very obvious for Flickr photos by looking at specific famous landmark sites. By aggregating public available data from both social networks onto census tract level, this research analyzes the effects of the number of landmark sites and population on the number of Flickr photos and tweets. The point clusters and regression results suggest that population tends to have positive relationship with tweet counts and negative relationship with photo counts on Flickr, while the number of landmark sites have much larger positive effect on Flickr photo counts than on tweet counts. The study discusses both the similarities and differences between the distribution patterns of the two social networks based on several different methods.