Platforms as service ecosystems: lessons from social media

Alaimo, Cristina, Kallinikos, Jannis ORCID: 0000-0002-4446-2878 and Vallderama-Venegas, E (2020) Platforms as service ecosystems: lessons from social media. Journal of Information Technology, 35 (1). 25 - 48. ISSN 0268-3962

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Abstract

The growing business expansion of social media platforms is changing their identity and transforming the practices of networking, data and content sharing with which social media have been commonly associated. We empirically investigate these shifts in the context of TripAdvisor and its evolution since its very establishment. We trace the mutations of the platform along three stages we identify as search engine, social media platform and end-to-end service ecosystem. Our findings reveal the underlying patterns of data types, technological functionalities and actor configurations that punctuate the business expansion of TripAdvisor and lead to the formation of its service ecosystem. We contribute to the understanding of the current trajectory in which social media find themselves as well as to the literature on platforms and ecosystems. We point out the importance of services that develop as commercially viable and constantly updatable data bundles out of diverse and dynamic data types. Such services are essential to the making of the complementarities that are claimed to underlie ecosystem formation.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jin
Additional Information:	© 2019 Association for Information Technology Trust
Divisions:	Management
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Date Deposited:	30 Aug 2019 16:06
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 01:51
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/101474

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