Jyri Engeström wrote some time ago about the case for object-centered sociality: “‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. I could not agree with him more. The glue of each community is something that unites them – common interest, social object. When you join new social network, you typically start by building your social graph – re-establishing links to the real people you know, checking if they have already registered, inviting those whom you would like to see in the new environment. But there must be something beyond the initial phase of building the social graph. And this is the problem that haunts giants like Facebook and MySpace. You cannot possibly have common interest with everyone, and you don’t want to share the same things with everyone.

While Facebook is still growing strongly, it’s morphing into some sort of a generic social utility. Thanks to the Platform API there are all kinds of applications available on Facebook, some of them creating social objects (like Circle of Moms or Cities I’ve Visited), but it feels like true passions of people are quite rare in generic networks. When it comes to your most important hobbies, you might want to share your thoughts and data with other likeminded people and not necessarily with all aquaintances on Facebook. This is one of the reasons why specialized social networks are thriving. Dogster.com and catster.com are two perfect examples of such networks with very strong social objects. Mark Andreesen‘s creation Ning – a place where everyone can build own social network – already has hundreds of thousands of networks.