<p>Technology standards are so often framed in terms of a technical solution and detailed in a fashion that is not readable by the every-person. Thankfully, designers have been involved and brought a good deal of visualization into the world of data science. We understand standards are necessary for the betterment of the field itself, but they are a turbulent process while in the works. More so, what most of us really want to understand is the impact on business rather than the inner workings. With the OpenSocial Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Social Business community workgroup making new push for Social Business standards, let's take a quick look at the impact.</p><p>We can see that Social Business applies broadly across organizations, customers and partners, whether as a change to how they do marketing, sales, product development or other processes, or a change to how people work together and interact. The huge growth companies with internal and public social network products and services have created entirely new global business powerhouses. Small companies have grown to multi-billion dollar businesses in the span of less than a decade. More so, they have so many billions of people actively using them, again on public sites or behind the company firewall, they cannot be ignored as any kind of distraction.</p><p>The Social Business industry has grown up, but we are still trapped for the most part by proprietary and 'just-different-enough' systems that we are still missing the greater global network possibilities. This isn't a charge to unify all the social systems into a monolithic global social network. Rather, it is like the Internet itself, unified across the world through standards, yet still made up of millions of autonomous systems.</p><p>So let's talk briefly about the problems that Social Business standards can address. This is only but a quick look because the places where social technology can go across organizational processes are quite extensive.</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2013/07/02/the-future-of-the-social-web-depends-on-standards/">Keep reading...</a></p>