GeoFeed: A Location Aware News Feed System

This paper presents the Geo Feed system, a location-aware news feed system that provides a new platform for its users to get spatially related message updates from either their friends or favorite news sources. Geo Feed distinguishes itself from all existing news feed systems in that it takes into account the spatial extents of messages and user locations when deciding upon the selected news feed. Geo Feed is equipped with three different approaches for delivering the news feed to its users, namely, spatial pull, spatial push, and shared push. Then, the main challenge of Geo Feed is to decide on when to use each of these three approaches to which users. Geo Feed is equipped with a smart decision model that decides about using these approaches in a way that: (a) minimizes the system overhead for delivering the location-aware news feed, and (b) guarantees a certain response time for each user to obtain the requested location-aware news feed. Experimental results, based on real and synthetic data, show that Geo Feed outperforms existing news feed systems in terms of response time and maintenance cost.