As new areas evolve, there may be a case for new standards.

However, paradoxically – the need for the standard is not known until the domain itself has evolved significantly to fulfil a business need.

One such domain is ‘status updates’. Until recently, ‘status updates’  was not a candidate for standardization. However, now LinkedIn has partnered with Twitter to propagate status updates via Twitter.

The basic idea is: “The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”

While other tools like Ping.fm also claim to be able to ‘post from anywhere to anywhere’, the use of Twitter could become pervasive as a mechanism to update status.

More interestingly, there is now even a ‘house that tweets’ and I have always believed that Twitter could be potentially the glue that binds the Internet of Things together.

In that context, Steve Rubel makes a case for update standards and asks: So, Why doesn’t Twitter and others team up to submit the status update to a standards body?

While the question is valid, Twitter itself may have no such desires considering that its aim is to be ‘the pulse of the planet’ as per a leaked internal memo.

The dilemma indicates a classic conflict where an area of standardization was unknown before it became mainstream and having done so, there is no real business motivation for the provider to be retrospectively an ‘open standard’.

Customers meanwhile continue to adopt it irrespective of whether it is an Open Standard or not.