memcached: hackathon at Facebook yielded great spec for new binary protocol. everybody's wanted it forever, but getting all the right players in the same room got things decided on quite nicely.
Brackup: great contributions from Alessandro Ranellucci recently (chunk garbage collection, age-based pruning, etc...) couple new releases in recent days. new mailing list.
DJabberd: bunch of people have realized that DJabberd was designed to be extensible and are now writing plugins. yay!
Gearman: Ruby and Python support, and updated website. and now DBD::Gofer has a Gearman transport. very cool!
TheSchwartz: working on a standalone server (with RPC being the Gearman protocol), so it can be used by Python and Ruby folk with a minimal TheSchwartz wrapper in Python/Ruby around the Python/Ruby gearman libraries.
And a bunch more work (code, presentations, meetings) about work on portable social networks. Looks like it's coming together, from a lot of different angles/parties. Should be an interesting upcoming year.