We've been trying to balance both privacy and user discoverability on Pownce to varying degrees of success since we launched the site three weeks ago. I just wrote a longish post over on the Pownce blog explaining our thoughts on this equilibrium. Thanks for everyone who gave us feedback on this subject.

Comments
kOoLiNuS - July 25, 2007 8:07 am
This exploit of "social services" alongside with the increasing availability of mobile devices connected "24/24" a day are making more and more necessary clever ways to manage PRESENCE and AVAILABILITY of one person's persona.
Do you agree ?
Maybe I could write that in a more wordish way in a full post or a better comment, but I'm practically starving ... we'll see later !
Nate - July 30, 2007 3:04 am
I can't seem to comment on the post on the Pownce Blog. (?) Did you close comments after 21 comments?
I wanted to ask, have you considered the case of someone wanting to post a message, viewable by the public, but only notify a subset of friends? My impression is I have to choose between the two.
Daniel Burka - July 30, 2007 2:09 pm
Nate: I'll look into the issue with the closed comments. I know what you're saying about that desire not to ping all of your friends when you send a public message sometimes. However, I think we want to avoid making this too fine-grained. One of the benefits of the current system is that there aren't too many options... it's pretty complicated already to wrap your head around who will see a post and who can see a post. Adding that half-layer will confuse things further I'm afraid. So, I don't think we'll do it.... at least for now.
Rik - July 31, 2007 10:12 am
Hmm quite a hard one. I remember that there was a fix for it, have to search for it. I'll keep you updated.
grtz.