Platform power

There's a lot of talk at the moment about platform thinking and the sharing economy. I think there's huge potential for us to bring these concepts to bear on good causes and democratic renewal, and we'll be exploring these themes through our new SCVO Labs venture. In the meantime I was curious about how people at SCVO experience the digital world, so at our last all-staff awayday I asked people to nominate their favourite digital platforms. We took a loose definition of "platform" - broadly speaking, somewhere that people are able to easily contribute or participate (for example sharing content or leaving comments) rather than just being a consumer of content. One heap of markers and sticky notes later, here's what we found.

The top five

No big surprises here, these are all household names and platforms that count their users in the hundreds of millions.

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Amazon
• Instagram
• Twitter

The runners up

All reasonably well known, though a few are more domain-specific (e.g. music, holidays) than the top five.

• SoundCloud
• Gumtree
• eBay
• Spotify
• TripAdvisor
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

The long tail

And now it gets interesting! There's lots of diversity in the rest of the list, which reflects the wide variety of interests that people have.

• Origin
• Third Force News
• Groupon
• Coursera
• Change.org
• Etsy
• IMdB
• Goodreads
• Vimeo
• Pipes | Drums
• Ancestry
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Behance
• Celtic Quick News
• SongSearch
• Google+
• Meetup
• Stack Overflow
• 8Tracks
• Mumsnet
• Not On The High Street
• 23snaps
• JustGiving

None of this is very scientific, but nevertheless it's pretty clear that, for many of us, digital platforms are just another part of our day-to-day lives. This is hugely exciting for those of us who want to harness the power of digital platforms for innovation and social good. If you'd like to join the conversation then come find me on Twitter.