I discovered the private del.icio.us bookmarklet through my subscription to David’s del.icio.us feed, and then once I’d bookmarked it myself, I thought, I should blog this before del.icio.us posts the link to my blog. And I then I considered all the layers of public and private, of concealing and revealing, in the set of interactions that led up to that thought, and I had to go sit down with my head between my knees till I felt less faint. All of this also reminds me of Terri’s post about Dodgeball, which I’ve been trying to write a response to ever since it was posted. The “ex-girlfriend problem” on Dodgeball — “the desire to list someone as a friend in the context of a social networking service, yet whose live appearance in a bar seems too close for comfort” — is a real-life analogue to the “I want to have a way to share my bookmarks, but not have to share all of them all the time” problem, with of course all the additional power that live interactions inherently have. Our social software doesn’t know how to parse these sorts of problems yet — as danah boyd memorably put it, most of this software relies on simplistic, even autistic models of rigidly controlled social categorization. Whether services like Dodgeball and del.icio.us can move into a more richly-articulated social model will, I think, be a lot of what determines their success beyond their early-adopter geek audience of today.