Most definitely, I think we all see ourselves that way. There was a Federated Social Web conference in July that was pretty well attended by the different proj

Most definitely, I think we all see ourselves that way. There was a Federated Social Web conference in July that was pretty well attended by the different projects, and I believe a follow-up event is in the early planning stages. We also have a federated social web mailing list, with w3c representation. We're all interested in inter-operability. It's still too early to tell what shape that will take, we're all experimenting in different directions, but from my take on it, the future looks bright for interoperability. We may find ourselves with 3+ protocols early on, but they'll all be open, documented and available to anyone, and the different projects hopefully will try and support more than one protocol. But eventually, something will rise to the top, it's just too early to tell what that will be at this point. But that's not hindering anybody's progress, in fact, in a lot of ways, the platform can be a lot more difficult to build than the protocol.