Geoinformatics and social media: New big data challenge

Fostered by Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing, and corresponding technological advancements, social media have become massively popular during the last decade. The term social media refers to a wide spectrum of digital interaction and information exchange platforms. Broadly, this includes blogs and microblogs (e.g., Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, and Weibo), social networking services (e.g., Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn), and multimedia content sharing services (e.g., Flickr and YouTube). Regardless of the particularities of each one, these social media services share the common goal of enabling the general public to contribute, disseminate, and exchange information (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). And this is exactly what the general public does, making social media content a sizeable and rapidly increasing chunk of the digital universe. Facebook announced in 2012 that its system deals with petabyte scale data (InfoQ, 2012) as it processes 2.5 billion content elements and over 500 TB of data daily (TechCrunch, 2012).