Our house, in the middle of our tweets

Abstract

Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and other public social media sites have inspired lots of analysis of public geotagged posts. In order to understand these posts, it is important to know where their authors live. Based on a study of 195 prolific Twitter users in the Pittsburgh area, and their ground truth home locations, we show that simple algorithms can find about 80% of people's home addresses within 1 kilometer.We show why this is near the upper bound of feasibility, show that studying as few as 10 tweets can achieve almost the same results, and discuss implications for future social media analyses.