I have a quarter of a bitcoin lost in a ripple/gateway transaction.  If I get it back I'm donating it to Open-Transactions.  I think ripple is great.  It's still a bit beta, but it works pretty well.  And I think it has a reasonable likelihood of adoption (I think its centralized nature will appeal to the establishment, and it has a bit of a marketing machine as it if a for profit company).  OT is so much better though.

I've made a number of attempts at getting OT running over the last 6 months.  The last time I was mostly successful, but still couldn't connect to the digitalis server.  I don't remember what the problem was.  I think I was unable to register a nym.  This is great news about federated servers, but at the moment I'd just like to see one or two running stably.