Personal before social
The guiding principle here is one that Brad Fitzpatrick and many others have relied on many times: The Principle of Least Surprise. PoLS is one of the things that's always guided our work at Six Apart, and we've found that many of our biggest mistakes have come when we forget the lessons it teaches us. There's an obvious point of frustration or embarrassment that can arise from exposing our personal MySpace connections in a context where our professional LinkedIn contacts can see them, for example. The fact that much of this data could theoretically be discovered anyway isn't the point. Just as much of the information in Facebook's News Feed could have been discovered anyway, the fact that these relationships are being moved from "possible to find" to "easy to discover" means that we should be thinking of how this affects social behaviors in this new context.
And the truth is, we don't know the right answer. We're hoping to start a useful conversation in the community to help find the answers. That way, we can make sure everyone who benefits from these new social features finds them to be a pleasant surprise.
A lot of great work, thought and development is going on here, by a bunch of excellent people. But Dave sounds a proper caution.
Here's a possible path toward a right answer, and some useful conversation along the way: Personal before social.
Too much of our thinking so far on "social networking" in general and "the social graph" in particular has been framed in social terms. That is, with what we can do — whether "we" are a company, a bunch of developers, or a grouping of some kind.
We have to start with the individual.
Privacy is a core issue here, and privacy is personal. That means our privacy solutions have to proceed from the person, not the group. I need to own, and to control, my social graph and the relationships it represents. Yes, relationships are bi- and multi-directional. Consent is involved. So is sociololgy and a pile of other complex human variables, many of them vague and hard to define. But what what I want, as an individual, is a lot easier to nail down.
I think it would help some of that nailing to leverage Kim Cameron's Seven Laws of Identity, into which a great deal of thought has already been invested, and not just by Kim.
Just take the topics