Now that the Anthony Weiner Twitter meltdown has pretty much played out, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discussion of the butterfly wingflap that brought him down: Twitter’s rules of engagement when it comes to “following.”

The success of a social network is largely determined by its settings. In 2006, an engineer named Jack Dorsey had an idea for a way for people to share short updates on their lives with friends and family. Working with a small team, Dorsey and his colleagues began developing and testing the product. This included determining the built-in boundaries of the service, a process which would determine the breadth and purpose of the entire project.

Twitter was a simple idea but settings had to be just right, like the proper temperature for a soufflé. Should the rules be very restrictive, to preserve privacy and intimacy? (Too restrictive would make the service less useful.) Or should they be expansive, and invite a wide circle to share one’s status reports? (Too broad a channel would mean a depersonalized cohort.)

The breakthrough that enabled Twitter to become the wildly successful service it is now came from a twist that was much more significant than even its founders knew: they made it possible to “follow” someone’s messages without requiring permission. Essentially you would take out a subscription to someone’s Twitter stream. You would follow your best friend or your brother in the same way you would follow Barack Obama, DeSean Jackson, or the New York Times. This was a break from the traditional two-way agreement that ruled communications in previous social systems. This changed Twitter from an asynchronous instant messaging system into a hybrid of a social network and broadcast medium.

“The relationship model was something that we debated a lot,” says Evan Williams, who headed the company (Odeo) that created Twitter. “In the first version, by default you were private.” (This quote is from a conversation I had with Williams in 2009, when I was working on a story for Wired.) But then Dorsey’s team came up with the idea that you could follow someone without them following you. “That was really important,” says Williams. “From my perspective, I wanted something like a blog relationship model. What I thought was beautiful about blogs as opposed to e-mail or anything else is it’s completely up to the recipient of the information whether or not they consume it.”

But Twitter was much more intimate than blogs. Following someone on Twitter was not exactly like setting up a blog feed or subscribing to a magazine. You became part of a visible community. In order to make this happen, Twitter made public the list of people you followed, as well as the list of people who followed you. You would notice when your friends followed the same people you did. You could make connections with other people who followed the same Tweeters you followed.

To further encourage the community aspect of Twitter, the founders determined that by default, all messages would be public. Weirdly, one of the questions that came up during this discussion was the question whether people would be creeped out when it came to flirting and other personal issues.

“This openness was the result of a lot of thought around the way we had started recognizing that people were communicating online,” says Noah Glass, who was part of the original team. (I interviewed Glass for the aforementioned story.) “We were on MySpace, and I got into a lot of trouble from various girls posting things on that thing out in the open, and I started thinking about openness – we all started thinking about openness.

“We come from a world where privacy is important. But we realized that not everyone shared this feeling about privacy in that same kind of way,” Glass told me. “People were having really intimate discussions out for everyone else to read. I realized that that the level of privacy we thought was important, was not necessarily important to a certain group of people for a certain type of communication. And so making any conversation open and followable was something based on those systems that were becoming popular.”

This thinking influenced the settings when Twitter, because of user demand, implemented a “reply” feature. The replies, just like any other tweets, were public.

But what if you wanted to have a truly private conversation, as with SMS or email, with someone on Twitter? This presented a problem to those with a huge following.

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