Facebook’s evolution: development of a platform-as-infrastructure

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook's evolution from a social networking site to a "platform-as-infrastructure". Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of Facebook's programmability and corporate partnerships, we develop an empirical historical analysis of the platform's boundary dynamics that ultimately determine its operational scale and scope. Based on our analysis of a unique set of archived primary sources, we discern four main stages in Facebook's long-term evolution and discuss the interplay between ongoing processes of "platformisation" and "infrastructuralisation". We argue that these terms foreground complementary aspects of the platform's efforts in balancing its expansion and adaptability to changing user needs and other "environmental dynamics" without risking its integrations and embedding in other domains, such as advertising, marketing, and publishing. Ultimately, our contribution illustrates how empirical platform histories can denaturalise the current dominant position of social media platforms, such as Facebook, revealing over a decade of incremental evolution rather than revolution.

Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities

“…For us, the concept provides a framework to determine how user groups other than end users become part of a platform in the first place and to understand the conditions and dynamics of a platform's expansion and embedding into other domains. 44 Therefore, these technical boundary resources serve as a particularly relevant entry point to determine a platform's users and to indicate how it operates on multiple levels.…”

Towards a Theory of Digital Network De/centralization: Platform-Infrastructure Lessons Drawn from Blockchain

“…Consistent with the general trend, the concept of platform started to emerge as the dominant concept driving our understanding of digital networks. This "platformization of the web" (Helmond, 2015) -"data platforms" (Alaimo and Kallinikos, 2017), or "platformized internet" (Flew, 2019) -is founded on the conflation of infrastructural and platform elements of the digital networks, with a pronounced prominence of the latter (Andersson Schwarz, 2017;Flew, 2019;Helmond et al, 2019;Plantin et al, 2016;van Dijck et al, 2018).…”

“…We have not been able to identify any work attempting to establish a relationship between the inherent tensions generated by the interplay between the platform and the infrastructural dimension of any digital network and the tensions emerging from the centralizing forces in blockchain networks. Neither have we identified any work attempting to study the centralizing trends of blockchain networks in the light of the platform-infrastructure interplay even though an emerging literature in media studies (Helmond, 2015;Helmond et al, 2019;Nechusthai, 2018;Plantin et al, 2018;Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019), information system (Bygstad and Hanseth, 2018;Costantinides et al, 2018;Lorenz and Stefan, 2018;Kazan et al, 2018) and legal studies (Zittrain, 2018;Flew, 2019;Flew et al, 2019) is beginning to address the issue.…”

Innovation on the web: the end of the S-curve?

“…In doing this, we overlook other important forms of growth in the Web, such as user participation and adoption, as well as open source and non-market-driven innovation. Previous historical studies in these areas have drawn insights from empirical indicators such as archived webpages (Rogers, 2017;Sykora, 2017 ), social networking infrastructures (Helmond et al, 2019), mailing lists (Hocquet & Wieber, 2018) and transnational networks of people and organisations that contributed to the expansion of the Internet (Siles, 2018). Growth of Internet software especially has been the subject of substantial literature on the importance of open innovation, where technologies are generative through being tinkered with or modified by anyone (Zittrain, 2008).…”