you bubblers are the best! started working with it a few days ago an i am in love
first question (as i am sure there will be more),
how do i create a user profile that lets the user decide on public information and private?
and along this line, is it possible to show some information to users in one category and not the other?
Have you been through the lessons and the key concept videos on the documentation pages, they should help you really get going.
have a search in the forums, this has been discussed several times already, look up roles and privacy.
Basically, you can create a field in user data type and then use that to check if a user is part of the role and display data accordingly. You can then also set privacy rules on the Data - Privacy tab against the various data types and use this field as a check.