According to The Economist, at least 3 companies (23andMe, deCODE, Navigenics) offer a new type of service where they will genotype several hundred thousand common SNPs from a DNA sample (e.g. saliva) you’ll provide. All this for a few thousand dollars or even less than $1,000, depending on the company. This is an interesting development, especially for us, scientists: if it catches on, the prices for this kind of services and associated technology will go down, and this will make it significantly cheaper to conduct whole-genome association studies with large cohorts of patients. This may also bring down sequencing costs even further and favor innovation in sequencing technology.
I have to say, I am tempted to try out one of these services. There are no genetic diseases running in my family, so I have no reason to be particularly afraid of discovering something bad (yeah yeah spontaneous mutations). I am just very curious to get a sense of what my genome looks like, and of how it differs from other genomes (from the HapMap people for example). Of course, SNPs are particularly interesting when they can be correlated to some phenotype, that is, if they can explain why we look the way we look, or predict disease risks. Provided customers of these services will be willing to give out enough details about themselves (with minimum self-reporting, and maximum objective tests), the companies offering these services could end up making significant discoveries in terms of genotype-phenotype associations.
Would I make my SNPs publicly available ? probably not. This is America, and like the article says, it does not sound inconceivable that health insurance companies will one day deny you coverage because you have an allele associated with increased risk for a certain disease. If doing a little research on the web can save them several hundred thousand dollars, it would be crazy to think they wouldn’t do it. Of course, I can always move back to a country that has universal health insurance if this happens 
