In Christensen’s examples there is a literal cost in cash money to the consumer. So an ink jet printer beats a laser printer because it’s cheaper and it’s pretty good. In the world of social networking, where I’ll admit I’m a newbie, there’s no dollar cost, just a time cost (or time suck, as some might say). All these sites are free to the users, and hope to tag on an advertising model to monetize. Right now they’re in the burn rate phase. They’ve got a little organic revenue, but they need to burn invested capital to get to a business and revenue model that is sustainable. The question here is, who actually gets to survival (or a buy out). Google has the advantage that they print money with adsense, the other players aren’t yet sustainable.

I think the more interesting question is, do users want want OpenSocial implies? What is the user experience of membership in multiple social networks? Is that good, or is it just information overload and confusing. It’s certainly possible to connect this stuff up and share data and a set of modules, but just like account aggregation in the financial services space — it’s a good theory, it’s just that the users weren’t interested.

In the case of software, opening up a system is what enables compontentized applications (one of the things people buzz about when they put on their Web 2.0 hats.) In the case of Open Social, Google is introducing a way for developers to have a relatively common way of working with more than one host app. A company like Plaxo can repurpose their Offering for integration into multiple services rather than making a MySpace Offering and a Facebook Offering ands Orkut Offering, etc.