A panel of industry experts convened at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this month, and moderated by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, discussed the issues surrounding Internet standards. We've written up our notes below and hope to begin a conversation about whether Internet standards should be administrated by private organizations or our leaders in the White House.

Once upon a time, "back in the bad old days," Kirkpatrick began, "the railways of the USA all had different track widths and as a result different companies couldn't drive their trains everywhere. Once train track width was standardized, an entire new era of commerce began."

It is interesting to note that it was Congress which finally intervened and decreed that the standard width of railway tracks would be 4-foot, eight and-a-half inches after experiencing problems transporting supplies during the Civil War. The upshot? A standardized railway system that not only offered national transportation, but provided more diverse business opportunities.

Clearly, identifying and working to standards is integral to growth and success.

Web Standards and the Importance of Interoperability

Despite many great minds working on standards in an attempt to bring unity to the Web, there are still major hurdles to overcome; the biggest of which, according to the panel is interoperability.

Eran Hammer-Lahav, the director of standards development at Yahoo! explained that when people visit a site, they expect it to work in the same fashion regardless of where they visit it from; home, work, mobile, Web. "If we want to build that type of Web, we have to interoperate with other companies and we have to do it in a way that is very inclusive," he explained.

For Web designers and developers, cross-browser compatibility has been a long term issue. Each browser implements JavaScript, HTML, CSS etc. somewhat differently and this can result in a myriad of issues for the user; from barely noticeable visual differences to pages that break across browsers..

Although the W3C has created standards for the various formats in an attempt to ensure content is displayed consistently across all browsers, adhering to them is recommended only, not compulsory, and as a result many sites are still not cross-browser compatible. While this may not be a major concern for everyone, when it comes to business it's essential.

David Rudin, an attorney in Microsoft's Interoperability Group, pointed out that if you want to sell your products to governments, some will expect certain interoperability standards to be met and if your organization can't meet the expectations, your organization won't be considered.

Interoperability and Online Identity

Six Apart's David Recordon, after explaining that Facebook has been in a dominant position for years in terms of both platform and mindshare, went on to say that Facebook Connect, the service that lets you take your online identity with you all over the Web, may be just what the industry needs.

While the December 2008 news from Facebook may have been welcomed by its users, others saw its proprietary code as a direct attack on OpenID as the two systems were not interoperable. Although Facebook formalized its support of the OpenID Foundation in February this year by officially joining the board, only time will tell whether this will be beneficial to the general Internet community.

"Whenever somebody controls the market, or somebody creates the market, others jump in and look at ways to compete," added Hammer-Lahav.

But if competition is the key, it brings up an interesting question. Identification systems are not new. Microsoft rolled out Passport in 1999. Does this mean the industry has been competing for ten years, trying to develop a standard, only to return to the point where Microsoft was a decade ago? Have we gone full circle?

Interestingly, while the broader Internet community wasn't very keen on the idea of Passport ten years ago because of concerns that Microsoft would control a crucial component of the Internet; today, it is embracing Facebook Connect even though it appears that many of the same issues apply.

"Essentially, Facebook is trying to replace all logins with their own, and control the creation, distribution and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform." Chris Saad, co-founder of the Data Portability project wrote on his blog.

Additionally, with Facebook Connect, there are greater issues at stake; specifically, accountability. While Microsoft is held accountable by shareholders, Facebook, a private company, shares no such responsibility.

"The most scary part of this," Saad wrote, "is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative. Is it Data Portability? Is the Open Web? is it Open Social? Is it Federated Identity?"

So Who Should be in Charge of Standards

With the Internet at such a crucial governance point, the question of regulation must be considered.

Despite the success of the transcontinental railroad, in the online world, a 1984 type scenario where our actions are governed by Big Brother doesn't appeal; neither does the other extreme - total anarchy on the Internet - where people can do bad things without consequence.

So, does that mean there is a space in between the two for an alternative, and if so, should that alternative be the organizations that in the main work to their own agendas?

It's a complicated situation and we'd love to know what you think. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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Web Products

PhoneGap: People's Choice Winner at Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad

The Web 2.0 Expo's startup showcase, Launch Pad, gave five companies five minutes each to present their product to a panel of experts and the People's Choice winner was mobile development platform PhoneGap. We present a summary of the pitches in this post. The judges who narrowed the field from more than 80 applicants down to 5 were Matt Marshall (VentureBeat), Anand Iyer (Microsoft) and ReadWriteWeb's own Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Nomee Introduces New Social Aggregation Software

This week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a company called Nomee revealed a new software application for the purpose of aggregating all your social networking sites into a single desktop experience. In a way, this software is somewhat reminiscent of the web-based PeopleBrowsr in the sense that it's attempting to pool all your networks and identities into one single window. However, unlike PeopleBrowsr, Nomee is not just aggregation software - it also functions as a social identity management tool, letting you control which identities are shared with which people. That makes Nomee more like a next-gen social address book than anything else.

Status.net Could Point to the Future of Business Intelligence

Few companies have captured the world's attention online in recent years as much as Twitter has. Rapid, structured, public communication between groups of people is not only a personal paradigm changer for many who have seriously explored the service - it's also an incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation. However, just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter's limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.

Skype for iPhone: It's Real and It's Spectacular

The official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks. Plus there are a few additional touches specific to this client that make it really great.

Skype May Be The Biggest Winner From The Web 2.0 Era

Skype does not get the respect it deserves because eBay not only publicly admitted to overpaying for it, but is also making a mess of its core business. Another reason may be that Skype flies in the face of conventional Valley wisdom where it has to be all about social media. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that Skype came from Europe, and we all know that Europeans are just lunch-eating dilettantes. Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
• Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteHire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire

Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That's a pretty strong statement to make, but if it's true then it's all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we're publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEHIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Trends

RWW Live: The Local & Mobile Web

One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, we talked about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way. We also talked about privacy and other user concerns and what is being done to address them. We had special guests from Yahoo! Fire Eagle, Four Square and Outside.in on the show. The podcast is available for listening to here.

Five Technologies Tim O'Reilly Says Point Past Web 2.0

Tim O'Reilly, co-founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, gave a short address on the 5th anniversary of that event at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and offered some thoughts on what's going to come next. He discussed five applications that he believes point the way.

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web, and Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.

The Future of Mobile

This week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four, a mobile and web development firm, presented at a session about the mobile web's future. Specifically, he focused on the different types of mobile applications we have today - native apps, mobile web apps, and hybrid apps - and the challenges of developing across multiple platforms.

What Can Voice Do For You? Ribbit Announces Winners of KillerApps Challenge

Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Members of the audience voted for their favorite product via SMS. Of those who voted, 43% decided that mobile development platform PhoneGap was the winner. We have a summary of the pitches below.

80legs is a platform that allows you to build "web scale applications" based on search and analysis of millions of pages around the internet. Write your code, put it into 80legs and let it run.

According to the pitch, 80legs makes use of the Plura system and can crawl up to two billion pages a day using a 50,000 node supercomputer. It's reasonably priced at $2 per million pages crawled and 3 cents per CPU hour.

80legs will be launching in private beta this week.

Bantam Networks

Bantam Networks is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM and part Facebook for teams. It is attempting to create a secure online workspace for business teams to communicate, share information, track activity, and manage contacts both inside and outside the company. It pulls in information from other social sites (Twitter, LinkedIn) and offers status updating, auto-posting, following, notifying, messaging, etc., from within the system out onto other sites.

Bantam is targeting small to mid sized businesses and offers its service as a paid subscription. It launched in private beta today.

DubMeNow

DubMeNow wants to take on the challenges of business card management and attempts to provide a simple way to exchange contact details by mobile phone.

Running on a variety of phones (as long as your phone can send SMS), Dub lets you swap business cards electronically, even with people who don't use the service. While the idea is not new, Dub attempts to differentiate itself by storing your data both locally and in the cloud; if your details change (phone number, title etc.) the system will sync them up so contact information is always up to date.

Nitobi's PhoneGap

Today's winner according to the audience, PhoneGap is an open-source platform for developing mobile applications to run on a wide variety of handsets using only HMTL and Javascript. If you can write web pages, PhoneGap now makes you able to create mobile phone apps that will work on all kinds of phones; a neat trick given mobile phone apps use different languages. This program makes developing for all kinds of phones as simple as developing will be for the forthcoming Palm Pre. That's pretty hot.

Right now, PhoneGap works with the iPhone and Android, but the roadmap includes other platforms like Nokia, Palm, Blackberry, Windows, and other tools which include Dreamweaver, Eclipse, and Visual Studio.

zeaLog

A two person startup from Silicon Valley, zeaLog wants to track your 'hacks' by collecting and visualizing any type of personal data you want to track in order to let you share it. Be it weight, drinking, or mileage all you do is enter the data and zeaLog does the rest. You can enter data from the Web, Twitter, and the iPhone and the company is working on an API to open it up to third parties.

Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today and explained that if you want successful social media integration, you need to think chocolate chip cookies. "Much like social media, choc chip cookies are made up of five key ingredients," he explained, "and if you want to succeed, you need to know what those ingredients are."

1. Sharing: If you love something, set it free
2. Integration: Don't try to do everything yourself
3. People: People who know: ROFLCopter, LMAO, PWND, Noob
4. Platform: One to one is now one to many
5. Authenticity: Stay true to your core competency

Although Digg has 4.1 million registered users, there are in excess of 35 million people looking at and consuming what registered users are doing. "If you're lucky enough to have Digg users looking at your content, you'll hit front page," Buch said; a tip that should not be dismissed too quickly.

Give Visitors a Customized Experience

In a recent experiment with Conde Nast's Wired, Digg tracked changes on Wired's site to see what, if any effect they would make. Originally Buch explained, the site had a 'share this' button but upon close inspection of traffic logs, it was discovered that the majority of traffic came from Digg, Yahoo! Buzz and StumbleUpon. So they pulled those buttons out of the 'share' widget and displayed them prominently. In doing this, they effectively told their audience - at a glance - "these are the sites we want you to focus on."

Result? An increase from 500,000 clicks from Digg, to over a million.

Another option is to go the College Humor site route and "hit your users with a sledgehammer approach," Buch explained. Particularly noteworthy, is that the site doesn't use the sledgehammer approach with everyone. "They sniff what domain you're coming from, and if you're coming from Digg, they'll hit you with the Digg button - the sledgehammer," Buch explained.

"I haven't seen many publishers do this, but it could be a good way forward; knowing where those users are coming from and giving them a customized experience."

Hire Smart People

The Telegraph, a UK based news site employs social media experts. "In the middle of the newsroom, the Telegraph has two flatscreens. One shows Twitter, the other Digg," said Buch. "These people are focused on Digg. They implemented Smart Digg and have seen page views increase from 500,000 per month to 5.5 million per month."

Automatic Syndication

Buch points to the recent changes at Facebook and talks about Facebook Connect as a great example of integration possibility.

The beauty of Facebook Connect is that it gives you a one stop login when it is implemented on a site. "There is no e-mail; there is no verification process," explained Buch. The advantage of this is that Facebook has recently integrated Facebook Connect into its news feed. "So if you have a share capability on your site - even commenting, that can automatically be placed on a wall; automatic syndication," said Buch.

Results:

• Registration up 30 - 100%
• Engagement up 15-80% comments - other ugc
• Traffic - stories published to newsfeed average 40 friends and 0.8 - 2 clicks

Note: Digg has not yet implemented Facebook Connect, but has Facebook Import (Facebook syndication on Digg) which allows you to automatically update your Facebook wall when you digg a story.

Make the Most Out of Widgets

Time, which wanted to show top stories on Digg had a proviso; it wanted to only show content that originated on Time. It was made possible using the Digg widget and according to Buch, extremely effective. "What we've found is that this tends to be more popular than even home spun 'most popular' widgets." While he explained that it's difficult to know why the Digg widget works better, he speculates it may be the sizing of the font used.

Make it Raw

Buch recommends using the various platforms for corporate communications. "We have a Digg blog, to which we post about once a month," he explained, "and Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with your users between blog posts." Follow @digg to get the latest news from Digg.

"Facebook has given publishers new opportunities," Buch explained. Pages, now public profiles are similar to the Twitter model in that they allow a one way friendship. When talking to Facebook, Buch learned that the most successful publishers were doing more than posting stories, they were using it as a way to share a little more 'intimately.' "Let your reporters upload photos from the field," Buch said. Although they may not make the actual publication, "it's a little more raw."

Find Your Sweet Spot

The real key to success according to Buch is to find out what your core competency is and being true to that. "The Internet is the ultimate bullshit meter. You can not pull anything over anyone on the Internet. They will call you out and make you feel like an idiot. Figure out what your chocolate chips are."

"Digg played with that," said Buch. "We posted RSS feeds for every single category and when we looked at traffic, one feed as much as 100 times exceeded traffic than other feeds. People were engaging; that was the digg2000 feed." "That was where we found our 'sweet spot.'"

Two themes stood out: sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.

1. Google Voice Search on the iPhone

Google launched an iPhone app in November that lets you search by voice. It uses the iPhone's built in sensors in ways that other voice searches can't. It's not just voice recognition, it's also gesture recognition - the application starts listening when you put the phone to your face. O'Reilly asked, rhetorically, if the service was "a tipping point for the web" when it launched and it's still on his short list of key technologies today.

2. Gracenote's CDDB

The CDDB, or Compact Disk Database. This technology isn't new but it represents the kind of thing that O'Reilly expects to become much more common in the near term future. Their time has come, these tools for pulling patterns out of large and seemingly random sets of data. As he explained on stage tonight, the CDDB service identifies CDs by looking at the unique fingerprint created by the duration of songs in any collection on a commercial music CD. It doesn't identify individual songs but rather analyzes the aggregate data on albums in order to identify the collection. That's pretty cool.

See also the non-profit MusicBrainz.

3. AMEE Smart Grid

The AMEE smart electrical grid company tracks energy use in customers' homes and offers all kinds of valuable information based on what they see. TechCrunch UK called it "like an OpenID for your carbon footprint" in its coverage of O'Reilly's investment in the company.

O'Reilly said tonight that much like CDs in the CDDB, AMEE has discovered that the energy fluctuations of home appliances are so unique that they can tell what make and model of refrigerator you have by the way it acts when the motor turns on. Then it can suggest a more energy efficient appliance.

4. The NASA/CISCO Planetary Skin

NASA and CISCO unveiled plans last month to build what they call a Planetary Skin of sensors to monitor global climate change. The ability to process all the information that will come in through such a network of sensors is a good example of what O'Reilly called "applying Moore's Law to the world's biggest problems."

5. IBM Smarter Planet

O'Reilly highlighted the IBM Smarter Planet project in his talk about the future tonight. Smarter Planet is a broad body of initiatives by IBM to integrate efficient technology into a wide variety of systems around the world. Much of it is public infrastructure work.

Last week IBM announced that it would make bringing its channel partners into the Smarter Planet project a major priority and that it will be sharing the huge amounts of data it collects through the initiatives with channel partners as well.

Those are Tim O'Reilly's favorite examples of technologies that point beyond the last five years of the Web 2.0 era. Have you got other examples in the same vein? Perhaps you've got a different big picture vision of the next stage of the web. This fifth anniversary of the first Web 2.0 Conference is a great time to reflect on where we are as a web connected world and where we're going.