That's a good point, but you can't deny that there are a lot of opportunities around social apps and games. And the whole pitch behind Facebook Connect makes complete sense: you don't want to duplicate a whole social network for your little app.

At Startup School, I talked to somebody who was building something on top of Twitter and Facebook, but his philosophy was "it won't last forever, but let's take advantage of it while it works".

I don't have a solution for this and it doesn't look like something is really emerging to solve it.

I agree.. Creating a separate channel for app notifications is a great idea. And if notifications are of VALUE, users may pay more attention.