Here's my for a discussion starter: Somewhat like email. Suppose I uploaded some pictures, and I can specify whom to "send" it to. Sending in this regard means

Here's my for a discussion starter: Somewhat like email. Suppose I uploaded some pictures, and I can specify whom to "send" it to. Sending in this regard means who can see it (eg. shows up in their stream OR can see it if they browse my profile page). You can send it to "everyone", or "people who work at X", or an explicit list of recipients [as with email]. The model behind such a service would be somewhat like email. When I post a picture and send it to everybody, it gets sent to my followers (and then shows up in their stream=inbox) and gets sent to my public stream, so that anybody visiting my stream can see it. When the visibility is restricted, it just gets sent to the recipient. Since the architecture is like email's it can be distributed w/o a central point of control.