You wake up in Austin. You check into brightkite. You wake up in San Francisco. You check into brightkite.

Now that being social means plotting your location, the issue of oversharing is top of mind again.

It’s not the idea of fellow geeks knowing where I’m at any given time that makes me uncomfortable. I have no problem with brightkite, and I love the idea of you knowing when I’m in ur town so long as I’ve authorized you.

But I check in to public timelines as well. And in those cases, anyone can see where I’m at. As a single person, the concern wouldn’t even occur to me. But family changes this, and lately I’m wondering how much to reveal. (Like whether I’m out of town.)

To put a finer point on it, I’m wondering how much to reveal on Twitter since it’s the one communication app I use that doesn’t allow privacy differentiation within a stream.

I understand Twitter has immediate issues to deal with, but privacy should be high on the list of concerns. Right now it’s not being handled with any amount of sophistication.

I don’t mean to complain about Twitter. The issue is more mine than theirs. And, fwiw, I love the service.

There’s a simple solution, though. Allow members to post private tweets by preceding them with a p. e.g., p You wake up in Vegas.

Those private tweets would only be seen by the people you trust most. I know that everyone follows and follows back to widely varying degrees, but, for anyone using the service, the segment of friends you trust most would be reciprocal followers (i.e., those you follow who also follow you back.)

I have about 150 friends in this category. And even though I don’t really know them all well, I’d trust them to know that I’m out of town or where I’m staying or, maybe, what my family is up to.

I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.

Just when I lost all faith in istwitterdown.com, I find out it does work. And even links to a helpful resource.

Some days, things just kind of come together. Thoughts are clear, ideas are sharp, and I get these glimpses of what the future could be.

Like today, I’m getting ready to deploy a mobile version of a content network and it strikes me that what we really need is a twitter version for all blogs. Basically, it would go like this…

Since userAgent doesn’t actually tell you if the user uses Twitter, we’d simply prompt visitors with a simple question. Use the Twitter? And if they did, they’d just Click here.

At that point, posts would collapse into 140 character bits. Opinions would be condensed for clarity (eg, teh suck or ftw).

An example post would go like this:

zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

And, then, comments would go like this:

@amentele lulz. springsteen is rolling over in his grave. srsly

retweeting @amentele: zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

@amentele - yeah, fail. u missed the best part tho: http://is.gd/AJ

If you’ve been using the Twitter for any amount of time, maybe you’ve already thought of this. For everyone else, I explained this all in an earlier tweet.

To those who think Twitter is simply about the technology, I give you ReVou. For the rest of us, carry on.

So we’re winding down what Newsweek predicted would be the Year of the Widget. I don’t think it played out that way, but maybe I missed something. (Like predictions being worth reading.)

If there ever was any real widget momentum underway, it crashed when facebook kicked open the Platform. (Feel free to hit me in the comments for using facebook and open in the same sentence.)

I didn’t like the use of the platform label when Zuckerberg first declared it. But 10,000+ facebook apps make the use difficult to dispute.

I’m not typing on the virtues of facebook here. Personally, I think the thing sucks - all ur bits r belong to facebook. But we definitely feel the significance of the facebook platform a hell of a lot more than any supposed widgetization of the web. (This coming from a work request point of view.)

Enough talk of the borg. The idea that we’re declaring working models is far more significant. Let’s example in on Twitter again. Popular opinion holds it as a working model. So, rather than build a standalone app to track iou’s, why not grab on to the API and drop a new publishing rule into the existing ecology?

I like platforms. Experimentation gets easier. It’s not the new way of doing things, it’s another way. The web is gaining sophistication.

At launch, Twitter’s story wasn’t very compelling. The site let you post what you were doing in 140 characters or less. Definitely not disruptive.

But 10 months later or so Richard is naming them best little web co of ‘07. He even specifically calls them out as one of the few disruptive technologies of the year.

So what changed? Well, the idea caught on, it evolved, and it scaled.

We get so many inquiries from entrepreneurs looking to launch disruptive ideas that I get excited any time a prospect says they aren’t sure what to expect at launch, or, better yet, that they aren’t even worried about the initial reception.

Disruption almost never occurs at launch, and forecasting it is impossible. (Odds improve w/ Steve Jobs on staff.)

But don’t let that stop you. Consider launching light. Think beyond launch. Let your idea evolve. Help it scale. Work toward disruption.

I had a conversation a while back with someone who wanted [us] to build [them] “Twitter with a purpose”. They knew it was popular, could wrap their mind around the technical spec, but really gave no credit to the app’s value.

If you see Twitter as a mechanism to post and display brief messages, set up light profiles with followed / follower relationships, and offer a straightforward API, then, yeah, we can probably build it for you. But giving that app purpose to even a fraction of Twitter’s participants would be something else entirely. Even if your purpose is all the money.

To be fair, it’s pretty easy to miss Twitter’s good parts. If you throw a tweet over the wall now and then and have sms notifications turned on for twits like me, it’s going to seem like one big cluster. But get inside it for a while, and you begin to see what makes it grow. It’s not a single purpose. It’s the open platform that spawns all kinds of purpose.

There’s absolutely no way the dev crew planned for it to go this way. So, if you’re looking to emulate, you’re going to need a lot more than a similar spec.

If you’re still not buying that Twitter shows any redeeming quality, switch the example to craigslist. Again, we could certainly deploy an app with similar functionality and even improve the user interface, but that alone would never capture a similar following.

Need another example? How about MySpace? Virb makes MySpace look like it was built by a monkey armed with Paint and a trial version of HotMetal Pro. But where do the people go? To the cluster.

Another? Digg. Pligg won’t be knocking them over any time soon.

So what makes one site lock on so effectively, and the next die? Your guess is as good as mine.

But if you look at the entire [Web 2.0] category, I think you’d see that the popular apps are those that follow / respond to their community vs those that try to lead it. Maybe some ambiguity of purpose is good.

One thing’s for sure, that guy’s never going to pay us to build him his Twitter clone.