Platform Inception: Facebook Messenger and the Emergence of Nested Platforms and Apps

• In Event: Paradoxes of Participation: Open Platforms, Closed Knowledge?

Abstract

Facebook is colloquially understood as the social network. Yet, the ways in which its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, describes the company is constantly shifting, ranging from a “social utility” to a “platform” (cf. Hoffman et al., 2016). While the notion of an advertising behemoth discursively positioning itself as a utility is in line with Silicon Valley newspeak (Van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009), Facebook’s growth reached such a massive scale that the platform’s infrastructural aspirations should be taken very seriously (Plantin et al., 2016).


The most visible side of Facebook’s expansion concerns its role as a business platform interfacing among a growing number of actors; i.e. end-users, businesses, developers, publishers, marketing partners and advertisers. At the same time Facebook continuously evolves as a computational platform, both in its encapsulation of the open web and more recently in the domain of mobile platforms and apps. We suggest that Facebook is becoming the de facto connective glue that touches virtually all the data flowing from and to the most trafficked websites and apps. This process of the decentralization of platform features and the simultaneous recentralization of platform-ready data has been theorized as “the double logic of platformization” (Helmond, 2015).


This paper extends this double logic into the realm of mobile media and develops an analytical framework for critically investigating Facebook’s contingent evolution as both a computational and a business platform. It offers an in-depth case study of one of Facebook’s most popular members of its “family of apps”: Facebook Messenger. We explore how Messenger expands its platform capabilities both outwards (decentralizing its platform features into third-party apps via plugins) and inwards (offering access to “bots” developed by third-party businesses). We are particularly interested in how Messenger expands in a third way, as a platform in a platform, or a “nested platform” (Tiwana, 2014), by offering third-parties the opportunity to develop apps for the Messenger Platform. By surveying the nature, role and evolution of a number of “nested apps” available for Messenger we highlight how business platforms, such as Facebook, evolve and expand both their computational and infrastructural capabilities as well as their economic reach.

Authors

• David Nieborg, U. of Amsterdam

• Anne Helmond, U of Amsterdam