This paper appraises the evolution of social computing, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a case study to illustrate the shift toward a modern social computing paradigm where the social aspects of technological development are increasingly controlled by a few dominant cloud computing firms through an aggressive expansion of their physical infrastructure. The paper examines how these firms not only provide technological infrastructure but also act as economic planners, shaping the competitive environment for their platform partners, setting industry-wide standards, and extracting knowledge and value from their respective platform ecosystems.