Platforms on platform

Social media companies like Facebook started presenting their technology as a platform, where programmers could build further tools to give rise to more social experiences, such as games, contests, and quizzes, which in turn gave rise to social interactions and experiences beyond mere conversational interaction. Today, there is a range of tools that allows one to build over the platforms. Another application of this is to gather intelligence through the data collected from these platforms. Twitter shares a lot of its data around the usage of its platform with programmers and companies. Similarly, most of the popular social networks have started sharing their data with developers and data warehousing companies. Sharing their data serves revenue growth, and is also a very interesting source for researchers and marketers to learn about people and the world.