We've been developing Profilactic on our own servers for the past couple of months; however, as the beta approaches, we need more reliable hosting.

We settled on Kattare due to their cost, their support to JSP/MySQL and for their reliability. According to WHIR, Kattare is ranked 3rd behind Rackspace and Datapipe for reliability.

OK, about an hour ago, the Folksonomy story hit the Digg home page. Since then, we have been flooded with beta sign-ups. Plus, the majority of comments (so far) are positive.



This is so awesome! Thanks to everyone who dugg it.

UPDATE [10/29/2006 @ 7:40AM]: The Digg effect appears to be over. I woke up this morning to find 120 Diggs, 33 comments and over 130 new beta sign-ups. Who said pimpin' ain't easy... oh wait, I did just yesterday. Thanks again everyone.

The Folksonomy.org story on Profilactic has been dugg. And it wasn't submitted by me :) It was submitted by webtech who has 303 front page stories. The 20 (so far) people who have dugg it include Aidenag (465 front page stories) and Chrisek (401 front page stories).

Considering how influential the top posters are on Digg, this could be very, very good for traffic and beta sign-ups to have 3 of the top 20 users digg it. Sweet!

Thanks again to Michael Zhang for the original post.

Now that the beta sign-up is out there, I have been trying to drum up some interest any way I can. I've sent a note to online friends, offline friends and even submitted a link to Digg (yes, I feel little dirty about that last one) and TechCrunch.

So far, it seems to be working pretty well. We've got around 50 beta sign-ups, which is about 48 more than I was expecting at this point :), and lots of traffic to the beta sign-up pages and this blog.

The first write-up that I've seen comes from Michael Zhang at folksonomy.org. Check out his coverage here. BTW, Michael also runs photoblog.com.

Thanks to everyone who is helping us spread the word about Profilactic. We *really* appreciate it.

The beta sign-up page has been up for all of 2 days; however, it looks like Google has started indexing it. We're now the #4 (the site) and #5 (the blog) out of 64,000 results for "profilactic." Hopefully, as we drive more people to those pages, the ranking will improve.

More importantly, we need to figure out how to get into the keywords that someone might use when looking for a service like ours. That is definitely going to be the tough part.

We had the idea together, we had the team together and we had an HTML prototype built. The next step was figuring out how we were going to work together. We all have day jobs and families (4 wives and 11 kids between the 4 of us) that we want to keep, so we had no other choice to work on our little hobby project at night or on the weekends.

So I set up a free Basecamp account for us to document stuff and post links to completed pages. We also started meeting a couple times a week during our lunch hour to check progress and set up milestones for the following week.

Other than that, we are all working individually at home after our kids and/or wives go to bed.

Having worked for an online media company for the past 7 years, I've had the opportunity to work with some really good engineers. After the dot com crash in 2001, many of them ended up at different companies around town. Fortunately, we all stayed in touch via an e-mail list.

So when I finally decided to actually do something with this Profilactic idea, I knew where to look. I sent an e-mail to our list looking for volunteers and, within a day of posting a very vague request for engineers willing to work for free, I had 5 or 6 people willing to help.

We eventually settled into a solid group of 4 -- me and 3 senior-level engineers.

I do the design and basic tech production (HTML/CSS) while they did all of the hard stuff like deciding what technology platforms to use, setting up servers and writing all of the code.

The team has been humming along really well for the past couple of weeks, so we have decided to set a goal of "Fall" for us to have a beta site up and running. So that means we could have something live tomorrow... or 4 days before Christmas.

Of course, being really eager to start telling people about what we haven't completely built yet, I decided to work on the launch plan: setting up this blog, building a landing page and e-mail form to get beta volunteers, crafting our marketing plan, etc.

I wasn't planning on pushing anything live until we had a better idea of when we would have the beta site ready. However, I was so excited that I actually got the cgi e-mail form working (I don't code, so I get excited about anything I do that isn't HTML and CSS) that I left the page up. Of course, since I linked to this blog in the landing page, I also had to build the blog template and start posting some stuff.

So in reality, a private beta is a few weeks away. However, it will be nice to have a group of volunteers already lined up when we flip the switch.

If you want to help us out, sign up for the beta.

After getting my thoughts together for the basic site idea, I knew that I would need a snazzy name. I wanted something clever like del.icio.us that still conveyed what the site was all about. So I grabbed a notepad and went to GoDaddy.

I spent a lot of time stuck on the idea of playing off of "I.D." Most of the names that I came up with were terrible. Not only were the names terrible, but the domains were already taken. Next, I began playing around with the word "profile." I dropped the "e" and began adding letters to the end. For some reason, without the "e," my brain kept thinking "prolific." After staring at "profil" and "prolific" for a while, I came up with "profilactic."

I immediately loved the name. It was related to the overall idea, it was kind of clever and I knew people would remember it. Plus, since I was using a bastardized spelling, the domain name was available. So I forked over $7.95 and bought the domain.

Then, I did jacksh!t with the idea for about 4 months.

About a year ago or so, I got the idea for a site that would allow me to keep up with all of the various "Web 2.0" and "social networking" sites that I had joined. I had accounts with Flickr, del.icio.us, Blogger, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, MySpace, Spout, la la, Instructables, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, GameSpot, TV.com, AVS Forum, 43 Things... you get the idea. Trying to keep up with all of the sites, profiles and the content I was producing was getting out of hand really quickly.

The original, basic idea was for a site that would allow you to list all of your online profiles and the links to the associated content (like your Flickr photos or your YouTube videos).

After sketching out a few rough pages and convincing myself that I had a pretty decent idea, I decided to see if anyone else had thought of it. I did a couple of Google searches and found sites that were doing things that were *almost* like what I was thinking (ClaimID and openID were in the same ballpark). Then, I ran through Emily Chang's list of Web 2.0 startups and came up empty as well.

At this point, I wasn't sure if I had a kickass idea that no one had thought of yet or just a lame idea that no one thought was worth building. Being pretty full of myself, I chose the former.