Exploring relationship between human mobility and social ties: Physical distance is not dead

Partly due to the difficulty of the access to a worldwide dataset that simultaneously captures the location history and social networks, our understanding of the relationship between human mobility and the social ties has been limited. However, this topic is essential for a deeper study from human dynamics and social networks aspects. In this paper, we examine the location history data and social networks data of 712 email users and 399 offline events users from a map-editing based social network website. Based on these data, we expand all our experiment both from individual aspect and community aspect. We find that the physical distance is still the most influential factor to social ties among the nine representative human mobility features extracted from our GPS trajectory dataset, although Internet revolution has made long-distance communication dramatically faster, easier and cheaper than ever before, and in turn, partly expand the physical scope of social networks. Furthermore, we find that to a certain extent, the proximity of South–North direction is more influential than East–West direction to social ties. To the our best of our knowledge, this difference between South–North and East–West is the first time to be raised and quantitatively supported by a large dataset. We believe our findings on the interplay of human mobility and social ties offer a new perspective to this field of study.