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.

中文翻译：

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平台即服务生态系统：来自社交媒体的教训

社交媒体平台不断增长的业务扩张正在改变他们的身份，并改变社交媒体通常与之相关的网络、数据和内容共享的做法。我们根据 TripAdvisor 及其自成立以来的演变，凭经验研究这些转变。我们沿着我们确定为搜索引擎、社交媒体平台和端到端服务生态系统的三个阶段追踪平台的变化。我们的研究结果揭示了数据类型、技术功能和参与者配置的潜在模式，这些模式打断了 TripAdvisor 的业务扩张并导致其服务生态系统的形成。我们有助于理解社交媒体所处的当前轨迹以及平台和生态系统的文献。我们指出了从多样化和动态数据类型中开发为商业上可行且不断更新的数据包的服务的重要性。此类服务对于形成声称是生态系统形成基础的互补性至关重要。