I have to use different applications on different platforms to communicate with people. There is no fully integrated cross platform messaging system. I may SMS one person, and then later talk to them on GTalk, or maybe send them an email if there is something a bit longer than can fit in an SMS. For each of these I need to use a different application (SMS, Adium / IMO, GMail), and more often than not a different application on each platform. Isn’t this what XMPP was supposed to solve?
Producing admin interfaces for web applications is a pain. More often than not it is it’s own project in itself. Rails Admin looks promising (for Rails applications), but it still seems a bit bizarre for something that usually has the same basic features for each project, it needs to be reinvented over and over again. Understandably there is some customisation, e.g. branding, but most of the time the basic features repeated over and over are just an ACL and CRUD.