“You can have a conversation without a social object. You cannot have a social object
without a conversation. It is the conversation that makes the object “social.”
Conversations grow around social objects, much like pearls grow around microscopic
dust. Social objects are about growth, they are “live.”
— JP Rangaswami
If you try and “inject” a social object into a conversation, then what you get, at best, is
a cultured pearl. That’s what mass media did. Mass media tried to farm conversations.
And created cultured pearls. Social objects are natural, not artificial.
A successful social object is one that has layer upon layer of conversation created
around it; as the number of participants increases, social objects enjoy network ef-
fects. Social objects are about participation and participants.
When designing your social interfaces, ask yourself what social objects belong in the ar-
chitecture and how you are going to support them. What activities are you going to make
possible that enable people to engage with one another around these social objects? The
patterns in the next several chapters address activities and behaviors that revolve around
a social object, as well as patterns to provide a framework for creating or delivering user-
generated social objects.”
