After doing some research, I realized there was a major flaw in my previous post regarding the potential of OpenSocial - the new standard will not allow member data to move between the various participating social networks. For now, the gardens will remain walled. Cattle? Safe!

So what this means is that if you build an app, you can plug it into any social network that participates in the OpenSocial standards, but not across multiple participating social networks.

Social networks are valuable two big reasons:

1. They cheaply attract eyeballs to your pages
2. They provide heaps of data about your audience

For reasons to be addressed in a later post (or in my recent FOWA presentation, if you were one of the five people in the audience), both of those benefits are best achieved via targeted, niche communities. That means YOUR community, not those big social networking warehouses. Until recently, setting up a scalable social network with plenty of rich media, Widgets, and whatever else was a big pain in the ass.