Recently Read Write Web did an article about wish lists for the Holiday. Gratefully, Giftag was number two on the list.

“In September we blogged about Giftag, a social shopping service that uses open standards. Created by leading retailer Best Buy, Giftag is a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy’s web site in the coming months. Specifically, Giftag uses the microformat hProduct - an emerging data standard that is embedded in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. It’s similar to the microformats hListing and hReview. There’s also a Facebook app. A word of warning though: one of our commenters noted some privacy issues with Giftag.”

That last sentence is a killer. The reality is that the problem was more of a communication issue than a privacy issue. It was unlcear that all Giftag lists are public by default. The user mentioned above was under the impression that list are and should be private by default. We apologize for the misunderstanding.

We actually think lists are more fun if they’re public. It’s fun to share stuff you want and it’s fun to discover stuff others want - stuff you may have never heard of before. That said, we understand sometimes there is a need for private lists and private lists on Giftag are just that - private. You make it private and you set permissions for which buddies you want to have access and what kind of access you want them to have. In the future we’ll be ading even more fine-grained control over how you can set permission.

But at the heart of Giftag is the social aspect. Sharing and discovery.