Sysadmin tools, microformats, and data exchange

In Sysadmin tools, microformats, and data exchange Luke thinks about using SMTP as a way to talk to different tools. I was a bit to quick to utter my 2cents worth of comment and suggest that lots of people are thinking about using Jabber as a protocol to do this, only to read in the further thread on the mailinglist that I`m defintely not the only one with that idea.