This is partially a presentation and partially a memo - and on some issues I'd like to get your feedback:

I heard there's an interest in the option to set a story to private so only people considered friends can read them.

I fiddled the following ideas together:

• People can add others as friends, this is a one-way action
• People can re-friend, making it mutual

If you don't (currently) want to consider this person a friend, you can:

• Mute the friendship - it will be listed, but you will not see the other persons private stories or get notifications
• Reject the friendship - it will be deleted and the other party will get notified

Now as always, there are some issues to that:

Tags and other statistics are calculated on event and cached to reduce DB load.
This happens using default visibility settings, in other words private stories are not counted, leading to a mismatch in number of tags shown e.g. in the tag cloud and number of stories with said tag actually available for a friended reader.

Being an added feature, this will not happen right now, but still, the issue remains.

So what are your thoughts on this? Accept the mismatch, accept more load on the database (might be possible to counter that using extended caching), count tags although you might not be able to access stories referrd to (the way LifeJournal does it)