Louis Gray has some important news regarding Twitter alternative Statusnet and a little known protocol called Salmon:

As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted in a post on ReadWriteWeb this morning, the Salmon Protocol project we first introduced back in October of 2009 looks like it is progressing beyond the planning stages, as it has been integrated in two small, but influential, social networking sites, Status.net and Cliqset – both of whom are strong open standards advocates laboring away in the shadows of larger communities.

The Salmon Protocol, which aims to define a standard protocol for comments and gestures (such as likes) to swim upstream to the originating blog, hopes to unify conversations across diverse locations. It’s planned for adoption by Google Buzz (See: Designing Buzz for a Google-Free World) and solves the problem that first blew up back in 2008 around fractured conversations.

I managed to find time to talk with Darren Bounds of Cliqset at SXSW earlier this month. In our quick discussion, recorded on CinchCast, you can find his comments on their support of open standards, and that network’s direction – which could hint at why they’re an early adopter of Salmon.

I’ve had some interesting discussions with Googlers over the past few weeks, and I’m still a bit unsure how much of it was on the record or not, but I can say by way of the background information I know, things are about to get very interesting in terms of the attention economy and how the quickly evolving pipe of real time information worms it’s way around the web.

If things go the way many of these bleeding edgers like Statusnet, Cliqset, WordPress and even Google want, we’ll no longer be beholden to any single semi-walled garden like Twitter or Facebook for our real-time access. Our future may indeed look a bit like what I predicted many months ago.