Tim Julien has written an interesting blog post explaining how XMPP is slowly being adopted to power the social web.
I found this nice blog post by Tim Julien: IM 2.0. Regarding the recent acceleration in XMPP usage, he says I believe it will spark a wave of IM 2.0 startups (not just ones focused around mobile IM, which is where you see a lot of the focus today). […] XMPP could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network..
I think this is an interesting read.