On exploitation of social features in mobility service platforms

The term service platform is used to describe systems that vary greatly in purpose, role, users, and architecture. This paper examines different aspects of services platforms, while focusing on the context of transportation and mobility. The goal is to identify how collaborative tools, user-generated content and social media can be incorporated to create benefits for the platform and its users. While various social media features, such as liking, sharing and rating, are becoming more and more common in applications and app stores, there is untapped potential in utilising other social tools with platforms. Platform design could help generate services in a way that supports consistent user involvement and provides benefits for service developers. The potential benefits of social media tools as part of different platform interfaces and elements are examined with an example case of the European-wide mobility service platform MOBiNET.