http://www.openmama.org/Great presentation about the idea behind it (watch it!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTPkXu_lTa8Just looking at the various APIs from Bitcoin services (exchanges, bitcoind itself, charts...) it seems like a big mess that tries to re-invent the wheel constantly. OpenMAMA tries to be one of the first real initiatives (and it is driven by the NYSE, hosted at the Linux foundation!) to allow a kind of "plug + play" style middleware that can talk to each and any of these services rather than having to re-implement everyone's API in every single chart page or trading bot you do.
Just imagine you being able to plug a Bitcoin trading bot to the NYSE data and see how it would do there, or displaying FooExchange data in your everyday forex software right next to IB and Bloomberg!
I'd like to know if you think this is something that would be interesting for bitcoind too, as this might also be used to do actual trades (or in bitcoind's case rather transfers) and seems to me one of the first proper initiatives of implementing an industry wide standard after FIX. Bitcoin still is partly in a niche I think because we have to rely on it to be integrated elsewhere instead of offering easier ways to plug it into existing systems. To break this chicken-egg situation, interoperability might be needed and Bitcoin could do a better job at that.
Also it might push forward a few more Open Source finance applications, the current ones I found are poor excuses for what any proprietory service offers out of the box. If there is a standard used by Bitcoin, this might actually send a message out there that at least to interoperate with the Bitcoin ecosystem you just need to adopt this new open source standard that also allows interoperability with much larger players in the future. This could create a nice bottom-up approach instead of the current top-down one ("let's just wait until we are relevant enough so they have to pay the price to code a custom connector to the bitcoin APIs").
