I love Google Trends. It’s a really neat plank in its platform, even if relatively few people know about it. Check out the graph below on news references with the word platform:

Interestingly, it’s always been a popular search term. Only recently has its frequency in the news picked up.

And Google’s just pulling data from other sites here. Go to TechCrunch and you’ll see that platform is referenced more than 140,000 times. By way of comparison, Facebook is referenced 500,000 times.

The Age of the Platform is here.