Gowalla Location-Based Social Network
Gowalla was a location-based social network on which users shared where they were by checking in. This is SNAP's Gowalla dataset: the friendship network (1,900,654 rows, 950,327 friendships listed in both directions, among 196,591 users, collected through Gowalla's public API) and 6,442,892 check-ins by 107,092 of those users at 1,280,969 places, made between 2009-02-04 and 2010-10-23. Each check-in has the user, a time, the latitude and longitude and a place number.
Cite this dataset at
gowalla.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 196,591 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Record
- Catalog key
gowalla- Authors
- Cho, Eunjoon; Myers, Seth A.; Leskovec, Jure
- Year
- 2011
- Source paper
- Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks
- DOI / arXiv
- 10.1145/2020408.2020579
- License
- CC BY-SA 2.0 Germany (as stated by KONECT) (LicenseRef-CC-BY-SA-2.0-DE)
- Records
- 196,591
- Nodes
- 196,591
- Edges
- 950,327
- Nodes are
- user
- Edges are
- friendship
- Attributes
- nodes have no attributes; edges have no attributes
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2010 (2010s)
- Tasks
- Recommendation (ranking) inferred
From the graph: link prediction, community detection - Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://snap.stanford.edu/data/loc-gowalla.html link checked
- Original files as received
- The source files, unconverted, kept for reference: mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-02, 110.0 MB across 3 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json. For use, start with the data package below.
- Data package
- Version 1.0.0 of this dataset as an ECHO Data Package: edges (1,900,654 rows), interactions (6,442,892 rows).
Citations
Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks
Eunjoon Cho, Seth A. Myers, J. Leskovec
Journal Article · Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · 2011
Cited by
- Large Language Models for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Pei-Bo Li, M. de Rijke et al. · Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2024 · cited 138× - Generative Next POI Recommendation with Semantic ID
Dongsheng Wang, Yuxi Huang et al. · Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · 2025 · cited 77× - Disentangled Contrastive Hypergraph Learning for Next POI Recommendation
Yantong Lai, Yi-Jun Su et al. · Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2024 · cited 70× - How and Why People Synchronize: An Integrated Perspective
Elizabeth B. daSilva, Adrienne Wood · Personality and Social Psychology Review · 2024 · cited 59× - AFDGCF: Adaptive Feature De-correlation Graph Collaborative Filtering for Recommendations
Wei Wu, Chao Wang et al. · Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2024 · cited 56×
Show all 10
- ROTAN: A Rotation-based Temporal Attention Network for Time-Specific Next POI Recommendation
Shan-Shan Feng, Fei-Yu Meng et al. · Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · 2024 · cited 50× - Exploring Causal Learning Through Graph Neural Networks: An In‐Depth Review
Simi Job, Xiaohui Tao et al. · WIREs Data. Mining. Knowl. Discov. · 2023 · cited 46× - From Clicks to Carbon: The Environmental Toll of Recommender Systems
Tobias Vente, Lukas Wegmeth et al. · ACM Conference on Recommender Systems · 2024 · cited 45× - Graph Cross-Correlated Network for Recommendation
Hao Chen, Yuan-Chen Bei et al. · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · 2024 · cited 44× - Graph neural networks: a survey on the links between privacy and security
Faqian Guan, Tian-Qing Zhu et al. · Artificial Intelligence Review · 2024 · cited 37×
Citation data from Semantic Scholar, retrieved 2026-10-19.
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@inproceedings{Cho_2011,
series = {KDD ’11},
title = {Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2020408.2020579},
doi = {10.1145/2020408.2020579},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining},
publisher = {ACM},
author = {Cho, Eunjoon and Myers, Seth A. and Leskovec, Jure},
year = {2011},
month = Aug,
pages = {1082–1090},
collection = {KDD ’11}
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Cho, E., Myers, S. A., & Leskovec, J. (2011). Gowalla Location-Based Social Network [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1145/2020408.2020579
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Cho, Eunjoon, et al. Gowalla Location-Based Social Network. 2011, doi.org/10.1145/2020408.2020579.