Tracing the evolutionary leaps and boundaries of digital platforms: a case study of Facebook

Abstract

Digital platforms exert a significant influence on the creation and utilisation of products and services across the globe. Past research has shed light on digital platform establishment, strategies for growing platforms’ scale and scope, as well as the role of boundary resources in stimulating third-party development. However, we lack insight into the interaction of growth in scale and scope as traditional digital solutions are transformed into emergent platforms, and how such platforms over time evolve beyond the platform metaphor.In this paper, we seek to understand the emergence, evolution, and boundaries of digital platforms over time through a longitudinal case study of Facebook. For this, we utilise Facebook’s publicly available documentation of its evolution as digital trace data. We discover that from 2004 to 2019, Facebook underwent four distinct evolutionary stages: interaction, integration, interconnection, and implantation. These stages were facilitated by two novel roles for digital platform boundary resources that we term as distributing and centring. Based on these findings, we theorize the role of digital artefacts’ material qualities in their evolution from applications, via platforms, to information infrastructures. The paper contributes a model explicating this traversal as well as the subsequent unbundling to a new entity repeating the same traversal.