The distinction between “run-anywhere” vs. “succeed-anywhere” is critical. I’ve heard more than a few app developers and entrepreneurs *complain* about OpenSocial because they’re already running scared from Slide and RockYou on Facebook and they feel like OpenSocial is lowering barriers for Slide and RockYou to uniformly dominate the app marketplace across all social networks.

I think that view is totally invalid.

Having worked at Slide, I’ve seen the intense level of focus and resourcing that it takes to launch, measure, and optimize applications for a particular social network. Scaling that effort from Facebook to any other social network is not going to be a trivial plug-n-play effort. This underscores your point about the myriad differences between social networks — not only does each network present a different set of demographics, goals, and usage patterns as you mentioned, but each network has a different set of built-in functionality, too! All those differences create an interesting topography of gaps/niches for intrepid app developers to exploit.

Point being, that IMO, the folks who won on Facebook are not guaranteed shoo-ins to dominate the overall social apps space. If anything, I think that the social apps marketplace will be a big enough space for multiple winners in each category, probably with local geographic winners, too.

It’s a biiiiig playing field out there folks…

-Yee

one other note i took from your post above — seems like the news feed equivalent / construction on all of the Open Social networks will be very important & relevant to how viral adoption occurs.

(guess you may have already made that point, but that jumped out at me as you were suggesting analysis of each network / viral loop).

- dmc