Last week my friend Mark pinged me and mentioned that I should get together with a friend of his who was in town for PYCON. I am always into meeting new people so I had dinner with Brian Dorsey. It was awesome. I was able to rant and rave about all my ideas, interests and whatnot with new and possibly interested. Brian immediately suggested that he introduce me to a friend of his who he thought I would enjoy talking to. So I was introduced to Anders Conbere. The reason Brian thought we should meet was that we both incessantly talk about XMPP.

Anders and I talked for a couple hours Friday, and found that we had a lot of similar ideas and thoughts about XMPP and its place in the world of social software, communities and data. Anders explained that we weren’t the only crazies who thought that XMPP should be used for more than instant messaging. He mentioned that some cool kids were also looking into the relationship of XMPP and social software. As Anders was dashing out the door to his flight, we decided that we needed to create or at least foster the growth of a mailing list to collect people.

Earlier today, Anders introduced me to Peter Saint-Andre who is the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. We chatted a bit and then came to the conclusion that there needed to be a place for people to talk about their ideas, uses, experiences and what not. And thus social@xmpp.org was born as the go to mailing list to discuss these topics.

I have a lot of ideas and hopefully with the help of this group, I can flush them out and really tackle them. I am pretty excited about it.