  The focused organization theory of social ties proposes that the structure of
human social networks can be arranged around extra-network foci, which can
include shared physical spaces such as homes, workplaces, restaurants, and so
on. Until now, this has been difficult to investigate on a large scale, but the
huge volume of data available from online location-based social services now
makes it possible to examine the friendships and mobility of many thousands of
people, and to investigate the relationship between meetings at places and the
structure of the social network. In this paper, we analyze a large dataset from
Foursquare, the most popular online location-based social network. We examine
the properties of city-based social networks, finding that they have common
structural properties, and that the category of place where two people meet has
very strong influence on the likelihood of their being friends. Inspired by
these observations in combination with the focused organization theory, we then
present a model to generate city-level social networks, and show that it
produces networks with the structural properties seen in empirical data.
