If all we were interested in was adding functionality within our sites, it is conceivable that we could have done so with de novo proprietary techniques. Why have we chosen to underpin these new features by adapting existing standards instead?

Cleaner architecture

Basing the new features on a suite of well-known and clearly delineated standards makes for a more comprehensible, flexible and maintainable system architecture.

3rd-party tools

Using these well-established standards within our portals means that we will be able to leverage existing 3rd-party tools to add value to our interfaces, offer choice to users, and simplify our own codebase.

Integrate with other content and across sites

By fully supporting these open standards, we make it possible to closely integrate not only across our own sites, but with content hosted on other platforms which support the standards.

It's better to be open

Over years of software development work, we have grown to appreciate more and more the merit of architectural open-ness. The benefits of open-ness will become more and more apparent in the future.

Get our google rankings up

Trackbacks and RSS encourage links from other sites, and themselves generate links from cross-site activity (for instance, backlinks from compliant content which our users link to). This will help to raise the search-engine profile of our sites, as well as promoting wider awareness of the sites' content.

We may encourage some new standards-development work

The uses we are making of the standards are for the most part quite novel. As we gain experience with these features, we will certainly think of new functionalities we wish were covered by standards already in place. If our experiments with these functionalities prove to be as interesting as we hope, it is quite possible that other developers will be interested in sharing the task of forging new standards to cover the collaboration actions we will be interested in.