Analysis of Facebooks economic and infrastructural footprint.
First, briefly introduce the platform Facebook. map the different perspectives, keywords, and authors related to the economic literature on platform markets (these are business studies and political economy). Where are you positioned? Why this position? Try to be explicit in naming these perspectives, keywords, and authors. Second, you are asked to reflect on your examples business model. Who owns your app/platform? What is the app/platforms main source of revenue? What kind of company is it? If its a platform market, how is it structured as a multi-sided market (i.e. what are the sides in the market)? To answer these questions, it would be helpful to find relevant economic and financial data. You can find such data on the company website (e.g. the investor page such as https://investor.fb.com/financials/default.aspx), you can find quarterly filings online (e.g. https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html for US companies or https://seekingalpha.com/), or you can use third-party services (e.g. https://wwwstatista-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/). Try to use class material and concepts to structure your analysis. Third, you are asked to analyze your app/platforms infrastructural properties. This means that you start by using class readings to explain what platform infrastructure is. Then, you analyze the 4 attributes of platform infrastructure (historical, gateways, ubiquitous, relational). You can again use company material to substantiate your claims and analysis to analyze the 4 attributes and argue why (or why not) your app/platform is infrastructure.
