So why have two places to do that - why not a check box on 'content', "private/public"?
And then I would have one place to go for everything. One place for my feeds, one place for my own content (be it published web pages, blog entries, calendars ...) and one place to direct people that want to know about me. One source of truth and not multiple places (with the every gorgeous multiple logons, multiple URLs, multiple profiles, multiple contact lists, multiple look-and-feel's ... etc etc).

And "you" would get to see the same content that I think you (in the sense of the world) is fascinated to see.

I now see what the difference is (potentially) but not quite sure why ...

(PS: there's 2 "r"s in Riversdale ;-)

What you're describing above is pretty much what a DLA does - Digital Lifestyle Aggregator, in the Marc Canter sense of the term. A DLA has private and public pages and aggregation/social networking functionality. It's basically a central place for aggregating all your content. In fact, Marc is building a product called People Aggregator that does all this (I do some work for his companny BBM).

A DLA, what a wonderful example of a TLA ;-)

I look forward to seeing the People Aggregator.
Be nice if others (Netvibes, Google Desktop, My Yahoo!) just allowed it though. Most of the these have a "public profile" and to add some 'content' as well wouldn't be technicaly that difficult.

"Platform" and "application" - I s'pose for me the platform is the Web (nominally via a browser but I'm not tied to that - via voice over a phone is good if it works) and that's it. Applications are things that I can use (they have functionality, the do something) and not just "show" content - an RSS reader merely "shows" stuff but a Calendar let's me add events, move stuff around and feed out for those that want to read my stuf.

For me all I want from the platform is the ability to get to my applications and content - everything else is up to the apps and the content. I also want (and here's the crunch) to be able to do that via anywhere and not jsut on the PC under my desk. That means I have to have a "lowest common denominator" platform - hence the Web (normally via a browser). How I get to the Web isn't thatr important - my pc, work computer, airport computer, pda ...

"Until now, Pageflakes was your very own personalized start page. From now on you can also share your pages (with your friends or colleagues) or publish them for everyone to see!"

The line between what you read and what you (re)publish is, as you point out, becoming blurred. This is a complex design problem but everyone's thinking about it so we should see some interesting solutions in the next couple of months.

I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on the design problem that you mentioned. Did you mean that there is a potential risk in blurring too many features?

Thanks
Ole