I am very happy that with XMPP the domain of Instant Messaging has arrived at a common technical base now. That is what e-mail and hypertext achieved a decade earlier.

However, today's Internet usage is becoming dominated by social media through social networks. We're facing the very same threat many of the now-open systems had in their infancy: locked-down platforms with no open standards that won't let their users communicate unless they use the same provider. I want to be a part of changing this situation, and XMPP is suited greatly for social networking.

I remain hacking for buddycloud under regency of Simon Tennant. It is really great that our code is open source from day 0, which I believe is critical for a reference implementation of a new (open) system.

There are a couple of new protocols we base on top of XEP-0060 Publish-Subscribe like caching PubSub inboxes. I know we still owe a very formal specification of these. We're still working on version 1.0 of our product to prove suitability for a broad range of users. After that, we will definitely take care of good documentation, because we agree that having multiple implementations is a great advantage.