Khürt, I'm a little reticent to use some of the older code in the OStatus plugin (suite) as well, but almost all of it was written by Matthias Pfefferle whose code I trust. He self-dogfoods almost all of it himself in addition to much of the codebase for other IW WordPress plugins. I suspect all of it works as advertised and I've heard he's continuing to work on many of these particular parts. The Salmon plugin may look "old" but I suspect it's because it's an older standard that really hasn't changed and thus doesn't need regular updates. The tough part about all of these options though is that they are all somewhat fragmented and only cover bits and pieces of these bigger networks. They've still got some time to "bake", but the movement on them and their current capabilities are pretty impressive.