Writting as a skill focused on one subject is nowhere near the understanding of the process of executing and causing evolution/creating something new.
In my eyes it's just a PR move.
Because her interest is in the academic studies of social networking and how the current and future generations use them (something that is lacking in academia and needs more attention). If her interest were in creating a business around a web application that has a central theme of social networking then I think your question would be more applicable to danah.
You could ask the same question of Duncan Watts as well, but again, he is an academic who now works for Yahoo!
http://www.socialsciences.cornell.edu/0508/events_06.html
Most of the papers aren't linked to, but you can at least find the speakers and then Google their home page or look for the papers directly on JSTOR or whatever.
Also, there's no guarantee that the designer of a thing has any understanding of it at all. That's pretty much the essence of the theory of evolution. I wouldn't argue that the design of social networks is a totally mindless process of variation followed by selection, but it certainly does involve a lot of trial and error. I'm not sure that the designers of, say, Craigslist have much better understanding of why it works than anyone else does. They just happen to have made some initial choices that worked, and when they made changes they used feedback to guide them toward what their users liked. That's a rational process, but it doesn't necessarily reflect understanding.
So, I can't see how any creator doesn't have the analytic-side in him/her.
Does the world really need yet another social network? There is value in both people who do, and people who analyze.
In my eyes it's just a PR move.
I don't think you understand MSR's mission.
Convince first yourself, then trying convincing me.