A possible interesting observation. Lotus Connections Home page Top Updates shows updates only from people who I am connected to. The Discover tab shows all status updates. To use Top Updates you have to authenticate as yourself whereas the Discover feed is public.

 

So, what exactly does Wildfire do? I see updates from my own feed (Top Updates) even though I am not authenticated in Wildfire (due to some limitations in our environmentn which mean we support ONLY SPNEGO and not any sort of name/password authentication).