My former co-worker, Aaron Newton, is launching that week the product he quit CNET to build: Iminta (as in, “I’m inta,” get it?). It’s a service that aggregates all your social network feeds into one place so your buddies can more easily keep track of what you’re doing online. And vice versa, of course.

Since Aaron’s a buddy I can’t give that product a fair review (see TechCrunch for an opinion on the service itself), but I did want to point out that Iminta has a cool thing going for it: you can put your followers in groups and specify which group sees what. For example, whether you don’t want your family to see all your Del.icio.us updates, you can remove that info from your family feed.

When I covered Yahoo’s centralized geolocation goods service, Fire Eagle, I famous that it had a similar feature: You can let different followers see your details in different resolutions. For example, you could let your family

know what town you’re in but not precisely where, while making you exact location visible to you co-workers, but only during work hours.

Facebook, and other social sites that let you group your contacts, have crude versions of variable privacy.

I really like the concept of variable resolution for social feeds. perhaps that’s considering, as an old guy (as opposed to a gen-MySpace kid), I think privacy things and that it’s not an all-or-nothing concept.

I don’t think any system has yet made variable privacy manageable, but it’s a new view, so I wouldn’t expect it yet. However, whether the notion of the implicit social network takes off (see Delver and my take on self-building social sites), we are going to desperately need variable privacy.

See additionally: Profilactic and Plaxo.

Original post by Rafe Needleman

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