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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Zeus Technology: A Load Balancer for the Cloud

Zeus Technology provides application delivery software to ensure applications are faster, highly available and easy to manage. Zeus' ZXTM solution lowers costs for data center space and power, cuts the cost of bandwidth and offers the highest scalability of any application delivery controller or load balancer in the industry. As the only software application delivery solution available, the Zeus products are flexible whatever your deployment environment; the cloud, a virtualized environment, a purpose-built Zeus appliance, or standard servers.

Static: The World's First Micro-Broadcasting Network

Static lets you micro-broadcast articles, photos, videos, blogs and more to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. The site is more than just another Ping.fm as the broadcasts themselves are grouped and tagged by topic and they can be voted up or down by community members. In other words, it not only lets you update various social networks but it also aggregates everyone's updates and turns those into a searchable resource.

MotherApp: Letting Web Developers Build Mobile Apps

MotherApp enables web developers without mobile expertise to create native client apps on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms. The web developer just has to set up a web site based on the MotherApp HTML specification. MotherApp then creates the app in the mobile format you specify and sends you the code. All you need to know is HTML - MotherApp does the rest.

80Legs: On-Demand Web Crawler

80legs provides web crawling and online content analysis service to developers. With 80legs, any developer can crawl up to 2 billion pages per day at $2 per million pages. In addition to crawling, developers can use the service's 50,000 computers to perform custom computation on the web content they find, such as semantic analysis, image comparison, video content extraction, and much more. (Sorry, no video of this one.)

To show our support for this initiative, ReadWriteWeb is running a competition in this post. We have 2 full conference passes to give away to the New York Web 2.0 Expo 16-19 Sept (value over $1000 each), as well as a free Expo hall pass (value $100).

According to a press release, the Web 2.0 Summit team "will solicit donations, and donation ideas, from individuals and companies within the community and then choose the 10 most promising and unique offerings to auction after the conference dinner." They've already lined up Tour de France legend Lance Armstrong, who will donate an autographed bicycle.

All proceeds from the event will benefit three charities, including WITNESS.org, which "uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations." You can suggest other worthwhile charities on this Facebook page. Also head over to the Summit website to find out more.

We think the auction is well worth supporting, as it fits within ReadWriteWeb's ongoing quest to find 'real world' uses for Web technologies. We'd love to see the Web being put to more use outside of the early adopter groups.

To be in to win one of the 3 prizes, we want to know: what would YOU bid on that web celebrities could offer? The 3 best answers, subjectively chosen by the RWW team, will win the prizes. Tip: both humorous and serious suggestions are welcome :-) Put your entry into the comments below. You'll need to enter your email address, so we know how to contact you, but this isn't published. We'll announce the winners by end of this week.

Big Opportunities:

1) web 2.0 in enterprise; "turning themselves inside out"
2) web 2.0 evolving into cloud computing
3) ambient computing (mobile phones and ubiquitous sensors)

e.g. dell ideastorm

real time user facing services based on data from customers -- your bank doesn't give u this, but google does

finding meaning in that data

google pagerank = meaning hidden in links (link is a vote)

other areas where "there is hidden meaning in enterprise data"

wesabe -- how people spend their money is a vote (nb: Tim noted he is an investor)

eg merchant pages give people collective intelligence about spending

2) cloud computing

Amazon got ahead of the curve by doing internet as OS; an ecosystem developing around Amazon's infrastructure. Google has got into the game with Google App Engine. Startups like EngineYard also interesting players.

Openness is key - programmable web

3) mobile / ambient

software above the level of a single device. So mobile does not equal the phone. He talks about Microsoft Live Mesh, noting that it is currently only Windows - but he's waiting to hear from Microsoft on its future.

new interaction paradigms - eg CNN's political coverage using mapping technologies

Megaphone in New Orleans

The Dash, turns cellphone into GPS

Microsoft Clearflow - sensors everywhere, puts in a "dispatch layer", aims to improve traffic reports

Quake-Catcher Network - uses motion sensors in your laptop

This all = Ambient computing; "web 2.0 not something we interact with on a laptop, it is all around us."

Conclusion

So are we done yet? NO.

Tim lists some examples of big goals that web 2.0 can still achieve:

Changing government structure

Publicmarkup.org

Everyblock

InStedd

Tracking illegal deforestation using Google Earth

Earth Day

An Inconvenient Truth

wattzon.org (how we use our energy)

To conclude, Tim urges us to "not follow the headlines" and the hot things, but go after "big, hard problems".

Tim finishes with a poem that is important to him, called 'The Man Watching' by Rainer Maria Rilke [thanks Sean for the link]. Very nice touch! His main message is to tackle big hard problems, with web 2.0. Make a difference.

Thanks Technorati for the free passes for 2 lucky RWW readers. Note: if you can't make it to the conference you can still leave a comment with your fave app(s), but please add a note that you can't attend - so that we can give the tickets to 2 people who can make it.

The passes include:

- all sessions (Wed - Fri)
- workshops on Tues, April 22
- all keynote and plenary presentations
- the Expo and all events held in the Expo
- all conference networking events
- Web2Open
- Continental Breakfast & Lunch (Tues - Fri)

UPDATE: we've had a tremendous response to this competition. The winners have now been announced and the competition is closed. But you can of course continue to leave comments noting your fave web apps! Thanks everyone for participating.