  How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space?
Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the "death of
distance", physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation
and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the
characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order
to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online
social network is analyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for
the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone
communication networks. For a further analysis we introduced a coarser
granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and
assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are
proportional to the number of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially
based modules resembling to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of
regional administration in the country. If the weights are defined relative to
an uncorrelated null model, the next level of administrative regions, counties
are reflected.
