Just a theoretical question to lob at you before the weekend: in all the clamour around an OpenSocial API, and how the blogosphere is polarizing it (hyping it) to be a Facebook vs. Google and Superfriends cage-match, when would an OpenSocial API *not* matter?

How about if everyone who “mattered” was already on Facebook, and was experiencing enough lock-down that they didn’t want to move social networks, and simply don’t care about the amazing cross-social applications that are developed across MySpace, Friendster, Oracle, Salesforce, and so on — because they simply don’t have friends or identities across such networks … yes, for the sake of such an example, let’s say that they either didn’t use, or didn’t care about the data and information stored through their email accounts either.

Now, to be sure that’s an extreme example of things, but I only use it to illustrate that voices like Don Dodge and Eric Schonfeld are worth listening to: the movement towards an open set of standards so social networks can communicate is a good thing … BUT — let’s not sell the power of network effects short.

In a very real, material sense, many people won’t notice or care … even if they’re told about the OpenSocial API explicitly. And that’s because for many “average” Facebookers, {and I tend to think about the kind of non-tech people at work, say, in hospital, who all love Facebook} many of their friends are not on any other networks. Many of them might have identities, or might use other networks peripherally, but to many of them there is only one which “matters” (with all due respect to Anil Dash and his colorful examples of friends and family using Vox, Livejournal, Typepad, and Photobucket) — because its a (recursive) function of where they spend their time, because its where their friends spend their time.

Facebook might have an advantage to abandoning their own standards for the OpenSocial API, but I don’t think that they’re in any position where they might need to be “forced” to; put it more bluntly, I don’t think that the failure to adopt an OpenSocial API will result in a loss of growth, due to, for example, people wanting to use new applications that aren’t able to reach into Facebook’s closed garden.

Rather, I expect many people to continue to have blank looks and shrug if I even put “OpenSocial API” and “Facebook” into the same sentence.