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I know that both Whisper and Swarm were is early prototype stages, with Whisper already being included in the geth client.
What is the current status of these project? I know Swarm has been largely superseded by ipfs, but there was a plan to monetize it. Is that still being worked on?
whisper is part both the go and c++ clients. It is a fully functional implementation.
swarm is being actively developed by the go-team. See the Devcon1 talk for the big picture. See the issues labeled 'swarm' on github.
POC1 will be public and integration to Mist will start after some more serious network integration testing.
Work towards using IPFS as alternative DHT underlying swarm has started, but nothing conclusive as yet.
An earlier writeup of bandwidth and storage incentivisation is online, an updated paper is coming out soon.
UPDATE: http://swarm-gateways.net/
Whisper is not receiving funding from the Ethereum Foundation but is still being developed on by developers in their spare time. A new version 5 is reaching its final stage soon. If you're interested you can talk to developers on Gitter in the Whisper channel: https://gitter.im/ethereum/whisper.
Swarm still is being developed and you can read more documentation here and also talk to the developers on Gitter in their channel here https://gitter.im/ethereum/swarm.
Possible answer:
It is not entirely clear where Swarm and Whisper fit into the development roadmap and when or if they will be delivered by the same developers that developed the EVM...
When I tested a couple of weeks ago, whisper works inside the geth client, in that messages can be sent, and that messages can be received using filters. When I tried using the web3 client, which makes rpc calls to geth for similar functions, I found that sending messages worked, but creating filters failed (so I could not receive messages). No replies when I asked on git metaexchange or reddit ethereum. Geth developers will need to implement the shh_newFilter rpc call in order to make things work on the web3.js side.
