Standards is another great way to create a foundation for something that is sustainable and dependable. In simple words, standards is something that can provide a universal way to understand, measure or use something. Standards have been around for ever. Currency is a standard for doing monetary transactions, kilogram is a standard for measuring weight and meter is a standard for measuring distance. In technology industry, standards are basically Key Performance Indicators or KPI. The popular ones are Google page rank to measure the popularity of a website or Nielsen TV rating to measure the success of a TV show (or MavenMagnet Magnet Score to measure the impact of the elements of your campaign).
The most fundamental element of standards is trust. The way you are measuring something should be fair for mass adoption. Just like it takes a while to build trust, it takes a while for a measurement to become a standard. Another key property of standards is that it should be easy to understand, test and use. The way you calculate the KPI can be as sophisticated as you want, but it should be transparent enough to test and easy enough to report.
Like platforms, standards depend on adoption. The success and failure of standards is dependent on how widely it is adopted. For good or for bad, displacing a well established standard is as hard as anything can be creating yet another competitive advantage for the business and a great barrier to entry in the market.