ReadWriteWeb

Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementers of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not.

Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.

After 18 months of negotiation, the Open Web Foundation, a group made up of 106 employees of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, some small startups and their lawyers, today released a legal document template for licensing open web technology specifications. The result could be greatly accelerated time-to-market for new technologies developed on top of these specifications and more awesomeness, sooner, for web consumers.

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.

The Internet is a mess these days.

Conversations are distributed and fragmented; a blog post's comments will almost surely appear on a number of sites other than the author's blog. Considering factors from Facebook shares, likes, and posts to comments on Google Reader or even content curators such as Hacker News, site owners have found it increasingly difficult over the past year or so to efficiently and effectively collect all the sentiments, media, entities, and data associated with any given piece of content. Salmon is a protocol that addresses this specific issue, and engineer John Panzer has begun an open-source project to help unify the conversations of the synaptic web.