Tired: Sharing; New Hotness: Privacy

From del.icio.us to Google, the concept of sharing even the most detached information one generates willingly or unwillingly has far less appeal than the concept of privacy. announced an update to his popular bookmarking service, now owned by Yahoo. The new feature, private saving, has been rolled out in beta for testing by the user community. Even though the whole point of Delicious has been sharing, users requested this feature in sufficient numbers to prompt Schachter and company to implement it. A sharing service without sharing? Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0's erudite blogger, Could this be the beginning of the privacy backlash against the Web 2.0 "social" lovefest? If nothing else, it raises fundamental questions about the mainstream viability of the Web 2.0 value proposition, which assumes that everyone will find value in sharing everything in public. Here's a Web 2.0 test: pick any of the hundreds of Web 2.0 apps the enable users to "share" and see if you can find on the site an explanation of WHY sharing, tagging, and being social with your media is a GOOD thing. Do any of them explain the value of sharing, or do they all just assume, Google managed to defeat what it considered an overarching subpoena from the Department of Justice for access to Google's database. Google enjoyed considerable support from the online community, and the Wall Street Journal weighed in with its famed statement to the contrary. While sites like Snubster have recently launched as humorous responses to the social media focus of numerous Internet startups, perhaps the next splashy startup will be a service that emphasizes privacy as a selling point. Schachter encouraged the "anti-social types" to give private saving on Delicious a try. There may be a larger market of those people than he imagined. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Drag this to your Bookmarks. David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.