IMS Basic LTI versus Open Social, W3C Widgets, Etc

Adam Cooper asked a raised an issue in the IMS forums about end-user and use adoption of IMS Basic LTI as compared to OpenSocial and W3 Widgets.
I agree that it will be difficult to get the average end-consumers all-the-way into the depths of Basic LTI. I think that what you will see is LTI serving as a way to enable richer uses of these technologies. For example, I could see using a Wookie Maker tool that uses LTI to provision Wookie instances – and then those Wookie instances can be used in the “more consumer friendly” ways. So LTI did not compete with Wookie – it simply makes Wookie better and provides admins, instructors, developers, and even user one more tool to plug these new technologies into LMS systems.
As a matter of fact, the first thing I did in Sakai 3 was to add simple support for Basic LTI – http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/000626.html
Even with support for OpenSocial – Sakai 3 will need to access learning tools such as Pearson and Icodeon. Companies like Pearson may find OpenSocial or W3C widgets a useful way to expose their services to users – but just like when a company puts up a Facebook application, it is usually some reduced functionality dashboard – rather than the core functionality of their products. This is because Facebook, W3C, etc are all limited in what they provide to an application and what Facebook provides is not sufficient to build a real teaching and learning application.
I would love to see a trend where the concepts of Basic LTI are pulled into these popular protocols – I would love to see extensions to Facebook API, W3C Widgets, or OpenSocial. Sadly I do not thing that in general education application raise to the level of getting a modification to OpenSocial to happen. With the Wookie/W3C effort – This is more likely and I have talked to Scott Wilsion and asked if he could add some of the requirements that Basic LTI solves into the W3C space.
I think that when we look back a few years hence, we will see that Basic LTI and LTI will be seen as helping to bring about a move toward more consumer-oriented widgets and gadgets. I do not think that LTI is a move in the wrong direction – I think that Basic LTI is the beginning of the move in the right direction – a direction that will likely result in improvements to things like OpenSocial and W3C widgets.