Also apropos the air-l debate over settings & community, a similar debate is occurring on Twitter, who recently made a "small settings update" where users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) In the words on one commenter: "The new policy isn't something you have to opt-in to. It's not something you can opt-out of. It's true for people who use 3rd party Twitter clients to read their Tweets. It's more fundamentally closed than Facebook is; on that site I may not be able to view the profiles of strangers talking to my friends, but I can see that the conversations are happening and I can read the comments. This new Twitter policy breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can discover new people by seeing who is conversing with the people I already know." Details here: <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_puts_a_muzzle_on_your_friends_g...
And you can follow the #fixreplies tweets here: <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fixreplies
-mz -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Associate, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org