A week or two ago a friend of mine released virtuerl, an Erlang wrapper around Amazon's EC2 API (with aspirations to be more of a generic grid wrapper). Also see this post with more information and this one with an install image.

Today I saw this post, Introducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example. It's a very cool app server for XMPP messaging. It scales across machines when you add hardware. The example app it shows is based on the Twitter model. So if you want to write a scalable social app with Twitter-esque messaging, use the API.

What does this mean? One of Erlang's strongest points is it's ability to scale across CPU cores and machines with a minimum of developer effort. It's beginning to fulfill that promise.

I've got to carve out some time to learn Erlang!