Brian,

Thanks for starting the thread.  Google's announcement  has been getting a lot of attention in the last few days, and it's exciting to see the key players signing up for it.

Something very interesting is happening in this space... we've been thru a few cycles and both the industry (providers, pundits, developers) and the community member-civilians have arrived at a place where we can see some breakthrough stuff happeneing very soon.  A community is as strong as the collaboration and interaction across its member base, and this (whatever "this" is or will become) will make those interactions happen.

I'm not so worried about critical mass, as I think we already have a large # of people who can be brought in thru existing elements.  The issues may be more around whether the utility will be evident and meaningful to sustain interaction as we "open up" the networking tools.  If there is "too much" or a sense of "now what do I do?", we may see far less interaction than we expected.  

I'm ready for the  journey!

For Open Social to be truly successful it will need the two largest networks to play ball.  Most of the benefits will be lost if MySpace and Facebook refuse to support the standard - and this is something they might well do.

Marc A clearly didn't ask his user interface end team before making the statement that ~"all the work is on the back end".  IMO, not since the green screen days has this been true.  It is certainly not true in these times of (a) ajax, (b) multiple incompatible browsers, and (c) multiple devices with varying form factors.