In another context, Amazon has the right idea. On many of the books listed on Amazon.com (the ones of which you can “look inside”), you can see a list of Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs). Here is an example. These SIPs are not so informative that they obviate the need to read the book, but they are certainly more informative than “most common phrases” or “random phrases.”

I wonder if something similar could be done for social networking profiles. Instead of listing your favorite books, profiles should list the books that you like that are surprising or statistically improbable for your age, gender, SES, and IQ. This would allow people to connect much more meaningfully than current profiles do. It usually takes months or years of close friendship to learn about people’s quirks. But if your Statistically Improbable Characteristics (SICs) were available for all to see, it might be possible to form serious relationships online more easily.

How could SICs be determined? This is likely (literally) a billion dollar question. It’s obviously not possible for people to accurately and on a widespread basis self-report their SICs. There would be a serious temptation to signal coolness instead of telling the truth, and in any case, I doubt that people are aware of their SICs. Maybe some sort of browser plugin/phone app/set top box/bank account combination could provide data suitable for mining for this purpose.

Even if the technological problem could be solved, I wonder if people would be comfortable publicizing their SICs. We spend so much effort trying to fit in. Would we really allow our friends to see how weird we are? I’d like to live in a world in which we would, but I’m just not sure that’s reality for most of us. But maybe if everyone else was doing it…

While I still find the Buzz user interface to be inferior to Facebook’s, it is important to look beneath the UI to see what Buzz is all about: open protocols. You can visit the Buzz API page to see what protocols are in use. The three that I find most interesting are PubSubHubbub (a.k.a. PuSH), Salmon, and WebFinger.

PuSH is about distributing content in real time. Any subscriber or client that is PuSH enabled can subscribe to any publisher that is PuSH enabled and get new content as soon as it is available. I recently outfitted my blog with PuSH, which means that new posts show up immediately in Google Reader and in Buzz.

Salmon is about unifying comment streams. If you spend time on both Google Reader and Google Buzz, you will notice that comments on one service get transferred to the other service. Imagine this happening across the whole web. That is the point of Salmon.

WebFinger is a way to get profile information and other data from an email address. If your email provider supports webfinger (just Gmail so far), someone who knows your email address can access whatever profile information you want to be made public. This means that disparate web services can find each other, so your Twitter account can discover your Flickr account.

Putting these protocols (and others) together, it becomes clear that Buzz is not just another social network. It is a recipe for a decentralized social network. Once the Buzz API is complete, if Yahoo! wanted to, they could launch a social network that would completely integrate with Buzz. So could anyone else. The result will be a less monopolized social networking experience, which will ultimately be a better social networking experience.

Dear Facebook: 1994 called, and they want AOL back.