There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
Zigbee or really any Bluetooth alternative.
Bluetooth is a poorly engineered protocol. It jumps around the spectrum while transmitting, which makes it difficult and power intensive for bluetooth receivers to track.