protocolbuffer thrift avro

Thrift is not a standard. It is originally from Facebook and was later open-sourced and is currently in the Apache incubator (where it's been since 2008, so it appears to be moving very slowly.) It is not well-documented -- especially tutorial levels -- and to my (admittedly brief) glance doesn't appear to add anything that other, previous efforts don't already do (and in some cases better). To be fair to it, it has a rather impressive number of languages it supports out of the box including a few of the higher-profile non-mainstream ones. The IDL is also vaguely C-like.

Protocol Buffers is not a standard. It is a Google product that is being released to the wider community. It is a bit limited in terms of languages supported out of the box (it only supports C++, Python and Java) but it does have a lot of third-party support for other languages (of highly variable quality). Google does pretty much all of their work using Protocol Buffers, so it is a battle-tested, battle-hardened protocol (albeit not as battle-hardened as ASN.1 is. It has much better documentation than does Thrift, but, being a Google product, it is highly likely to be unstable (in the sense of ever-changing, not in the sense of unreliable). The IDL is also C-like.

All of the above systems use a schema defined in some kind of IDL to generate code for a target language that is then used in encoding and decoding. Avro does not. Avro's typing is dynamic and its schema data is used at runtime directly both to encode and decode (which has some obvious costs in processing, but also some obvious benefits vis a vis dynamic languages and a lack of a need for tagging types, etc.). Its schema uses JSON which makes supporting Avro in a new language a bit easier to manage if there's already a JSON library. Again, as with most wheel-reinventing protocol description systems, Avro is also not standardized.