Social gaming - repackaged RPGs?

Here's a post by Brenda Brathwaite, a professional game designer based in San Fransisco:

Some Forming Social Game Theories 

This is confirmation that the notion of social gaming is being made up as we go along.  This is not a bad thing, per se.  New phenomenon, be they cultural, technological, or whatever, emerge all the time.  People recognize something unique and then invent the vocabulary to describe it.  This is the natural order of things.  When it comes to social gaming, however, we have yet to establish if it is, in fact, something new.
 
The list of forming social game theories provided above was started on Twitter and then moved to the author's blog for safe keeping.  It is intriguing because it appears to be the product of real industry professionals, as opposed to amateur hacks like myself.  Several of the suggested theories fall into the category of interface design, and are thus not peculiar to the social gaming phenomenon.  The bulk of the theories, though, lend credence to the one recently postulated by myself: i.e., social games do not draw to any natural conclusion.
 
This broad theory is fleshed out quite nicely by Brathwaite and her colleagues.  Here are a couple of the more poignant observations quoted directly from her blog:

Players should:

1. Have short-term problems to solve (in a session) and long-term problems to solve (multiple sessions). Longer term problems/desires may be aspirational goals, collections or quests to complete.  
2. Feel like they have agency in the game. Through their direct action, something happens. Without them, it doesn’t happen. If you never plant crops, you never get results.
3. Feel good about posting something in their feed. They believe what they’re posting will help them and help their friends playing the game, too. 
4. Have clear dailies including friend grind, playspace grind and bonus progression, if applicable. What do I do everyday when I come back to the game? Do I know that I have finished what I needed to do? How do I know that I need to do it (and no, your last play session isn’t enough).

These four observations best complement the interminable nature of social gaming without encroaching upon or muddying the distinctive elements of what might be called traditional gaming.

So then, what's new about social gaming?  Still nothing that I can see.  Dungeons & Dragons, which has been played for decades offline, so to speak, may possess all those characteristics, as per the will of the dungeon master... well, all of the characteristics except for the feed-posting, which no one really likes anyway.  In any case, it doesn't take much effort to pair this characteristic with a loose analog (e.g., D&D dorks talking about D&D, much to the annoyance of everyone else riding the bus). 

Still, I remain optimistic that there is something new in social gaming worthy of interest.  Any suggestions as to what that elusive new element actually may be?