Over the past few years, food and drink have become an essential part of our social media footprints. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – after all, eating and drinking were social activities long before the first #foodporn hashtag on Instagram. In fact, scientific studies have showed that what we gobble up or gulp down is shaped by social and regional influences, and how we tend to mirror habits of people with shared social connections.
Nowadays, we have an unprecedented opportunity to study eating & drinking habits at scale, as people share more and more of that online, both on popular social networks like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but also on “dedicated” apps like Yummly or Untappd.
Along these lines is our recent paper, “Of Wines and Reviews: Measuring and Modeling the Vivino Wine Social Network,” recently presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2018) in Barcelona. The study – co-authored by former UCL undergraduate student Neema Kotonya, Italian wine journalist Paolo De Cristofaro, and UCL faculty Emiliano De Cristofaro – presented a preliminary study showcasing big-data and social network analysis of how users worldwide consume, rate, and provide reviews of wines. We did so through the lens of Vivino, a popular wine social network. (And, yes, Paolo is Emiliano’s brother! 😊)
What is Vivino?
Vivino.com is an online community for wine enthusiasts, available both as a web and a mobile application. It was founded in 2009 by Heini Zachariassen, with his colleague Theis Sondergaard joining in 2010. In a nutshell, Vivino allows users to review and purchase wines through third-party vendors. The mobile app also provides a “wine scanner” functionality – i.e., users can upload pictures of wine labels and access reviews and details about the wine/winery.
But Vivino is actually a social network, as it allows wine enthusiasts to communicate with and follow each other, as well as share reviews and recommendations. As of September 2018, it had 32 million users, 9.7 million wines covering a multitude of wine styles, grapes, and geographical regions, as well as 103.7 million ratings and almost 35 million reviews.
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