Jyri Engestrom (who blogs at zengestrom.com) is applying sociological theory to the online world to explain why some social networks work and others don’t.

Design is always motivated by theory, he says. The most popular theories behind social networks are ones discussed in the books Links and Nexus: “A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals.” (He takes this definition from Wikipedia.) This doesn’t explain what connects particular people and not others. But another tradition of theorizing, people connect to each other through a shared object.

By object, he means things such as dates and jobs in addition to tangible objects. “Tangible objects invite play.” Objects “knot” networks. “When a service fails to offer the users a good way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object.” “The services that we love to play with hvae made those objects tangible: They afford tagging, crafting, tuning, hacking…ways of playing and fabricating.” Objectives are goal; objects generate new goals.

[Great talk, but he’s stretched “object” so far that I’m not sure it can be use as the differentiator. I.e., LinkedIn has an object — contacts — but it’s still failed because it’s not very useful. LATER NOTE: I raised on the conference IRC and people straightened me out: You have to have objects that people can play with.]

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