Yes, I think a lot of developers/freelancers/startups desperately need an OS tool like this that they can plug into their larger codebase/CMS. I see it as the evolution of the WYSIWYG/rich-text editor.
I've read through the blog, the comment would have been useful on differentiating Matrix from XMPP. Also, sort of off topic, but Skype has a XMPP bridge and WhatsApp is built on XMPP (they just don't support federation).
Oops - I should have called it out more clearly in the blog.
The biggest difference we have over XMPP is probably that messages in Matrix get synchronised over all the participants of a conversation... so you get distributed chat history for free, and no single points of failure on group chat (as you do with XMPP MUCs). And obviously Matrix is plain HTTP+JSON rather than messing around with XML.
One of the reasons we built Matrix is because, in practice, pretty much all the current big players started off using XMPP for developing their chat solutions: Google Talk was originally XMPP; I believe Facebook Messenger was built out at first on ejabberd; WhatsApp was originally XMPP etc; even APNS was originally XMPP!
But ALL of them have ended up mutating it to a proprietary closed standard - and nobody has even tried open federation other than Google's misadventure with Talk. So, unfortunately, it seems XMPP hasn't ended up being the interoperable web-for-IM that we all hoped.
Now, I have absolutely no idea if Matrix will be more successful in solving the problem; the hope is that by keeping it simple and using HTTP APIs there's more of a chance that players of all sizes will start exposing Matrix APIs for federation. Only time will tell. It's also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is a relatively recent potential obstacle: given iMessage and Telegram etc are all end-to-end encrypted, for them to ever federate with Matrix we'll need to support the same semantics and crypto. Hopefully we're going about this the right way (although end-to-end crypto isn't formally specified or implemented yet), but will be an interesting challenge. And one that XMPP hasn't tried to solve at all, as far as I know.
Big fan of your Velocity.JS, Julian. How does Blast.JS compare to Lettering.JS? (http://letteringjs.com/)
Edit: It's been awhile since I've looked at Lettering, but to answer my own question, Lettering only splits on individual letters, while Blast allows for user-definable splits.
Lettering.js has a slightly smaller footprint and aims to be a dead-simple "wrap spans around each letter/word in the HTML element I point you at." Accordingly, it discards your HTML then dumbly splits using spaces as delimiters. Because of this, you have to use Lettering.js in silo'd portions of your page where you don't mind losing HTML and event handlers. Further, its lack of UTF-8/multilingual text parsing means that it's only suitable for English, and only in controlled portions of your page where you already know exactly how text is written out.
Blast, in comparison, tries to be a "set it and forget it" library. Point it at anything, blast it apart, then even reverse what you've done ($el.blast(false);). You can apply it to user-generated text in real-time and not worry about a thing.
Perhaps most important, though, is that Blast.js features a sentence delimiter plus search, which Lettering.js does not.
