Welcome to the Matrix blog!

Today is a big day for us as we are launching Matrix.org, an open initiative which has the goal of making real-time communication over IP as seamless and interoperable as email.

How do we want to achieve this? Very simply by creating a new federated, open-source ecosystem for VoIP and instant messaging on the internet! Ambitious right? :)

Actually not that much! In practice it's fairly simple: we are publishing the specification of a pragmatic and lightweight open standard, some opensource reference implementations of the servers and clients, and pragmatic RESTful HTTP JSON APIs, all of which are available right now on Github!

What does this mean for the world?

For techies, it gives developers a new way of building and running their own communications functionality, or integrating existing services into the Matrix ecosystem.

For consumers, it means that eventually they may be able to choose to use their favourite app from their trusted app provider, whilst reaching anyone they like given the entire Matrix ecosystem is interoperable.

So this is the very high level description of Matrix, but it misses the reasons why we've started this. We thought that rather than summarizing the main reasons for launching this project in a faceless post it would be interesting to present it from different perspectives, so we've asked some of the core team to give their take on it:

- Read Matthew's post and get an insight of Matrix' technical history and rationale.

- Check out Amandine's view on why the users need Matrix.

The Matrix Team

PS: Matrix is hoping to talk about the future of communication in general at SXSW Interactive  - if you like the idea of Matrix, please vote for us by clicking here before September 5th!