With SMS, there is an additional layer. You can choose to have direct messaged (which only go to one person, in contrast with regular status updates which go to the public) sent to your phone or just to your e-mail.

This works out alright. There are a couple more features I wish it had such as the ability to tag or group people and then turn on and off SMS messages for these groups. But I am wondering if we can apply this granularity type to other aspects of social networking and at the same time have it be decentralized. You galaxy analogy should somehow take into consideration white listing not by domain name, but by the full address, maybe by the “planet” regardless of the other bad planets in the galaxy.

Interesting perspective on Twitter. It happens to be relevant to some of the software I’m working on now. I’d like to understand more this case where one might not want to give one’s phone number to friends, but wouldn’t mind receiving SMS disturbances from these friends the likes of “Wondering what to twitter.” It could simply be the ability to revoke the privilege of communicating with you that is appealing; though, if it’s that, wouldn’t a black-list on your phone just be easier?

The privacy of email addresses is indeed a difficult example, though I think it’s actually a good one in that it doesn’t over-simplify the problem. I’ll post some thoughts about the privacy of photos in a minute.

Thanks for the comment.

–Mason

Twitter is a whitlist manager for people who can send me SMS messages, and the cool thing is that I don’t need to give al my friends my phone number. Could this be the model to follow?

Whitlist=DRM=some privacy control. I agree that whitlists might not scale right now, but somone needs to come up with the architecture that will work.