We are proud to announce the launch of the Social Software Alliance

The brainchild of the pioneers at SocialText the alliance is intended to be a place where the developers & users of social software can come together to create open standards, and, contribute industry best practices.  Our initial aims are:

• aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
• assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
• help promote each standard to gain wider adoption

Quoting from the call for discussion:

"The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc. "

There will be a SocialText sponsored Happening tomorrow (see the site for more details) and we hope that anyone who is interested in the development of social software will come and get involved.