and I'm one of them!

Think there is a lot of competition in terms of getting free publicity for your new web service? If not, just start one (or just say you're starting one) and you'll quickly find out the names of every other person who has a competing service. How? Just read the "comments" section of any blog that mentions *your* service.

It all started back after we were Dugg in October. We didn't even have our site open to beta users; however, we started hearing how much we were like FindMeOn... from the guy who started FindMeOn. Ever since, whenever Profilactic is mentioned, you can expect him to chime in about FindMeOn.

Since then, I've seen all kinds of other start-ups claiming to either be just like us or completely different from us (depending on how they want to position themselves).

I'm not trying to be a "playa hater." Far from it, I think it is great that everyone is trying so hard to get their service in front of their intended audience. I just find the phenomenon interesting.

Plus, I can't complain too loudly since I found myself doing it tonight on blog posts about Upscoop and Ziki.

Just a heads up to let you all know that we fixed a small bug on the Edit Profile page. Users with January birthdays couldn't get their birthdays to update after editing their profile. Now, all Capricornians and Aquarians are supported. Pass it on.

I discovered a site that allows you to track all of the blog comments that you post. It is called CoComment.

You can either install an extension (the automatic way) or a bookmarklet (in case you want to choose which things get tracked) to save your comments to CoComment.

You get a single page and RSS to track them on.

Of course, that RSS feed is perfect for use as a Custom Site on Profilactic. I have mine in my Mashup already. Check it out here.

The only bummer I've found is that there seems to be no way to remove a comment from your CoComment page. For example, I did a test post using the CoComment test blog and it shows up in my RSS feed. I would really like to be able to delete it.

Other than that, I think the service is great and should be a perfect complement for members of Profilactic. We will probably add CoComment as one of our default sites since they use your username in both their URLs and RSS feeds. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Actually if you want to stop tracking a conversation, you need to go back to the post that you commented on and, if you are using the Firefox extension, you uncheck the "Track this conversation" checkbox on the Post a comment form.

A couple of quick notes about some recent feature rollouts.

Profile tags -- if you had Interests or Music or other items listed in your Profile before we rolled out the public beta on January 22, you need to click the "Edit profile" link on your profile page and then click the "Finish!" button at the bottom of the page. This will get your existing tags to work properly as linkable tags.

Speed of the Friends' Mashup -- with all of the new sign-ups from the public beta, the Friends' Mashup performance has been affected. We are currently working on making it much faster. Should have something out early next week.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Since opening up the site on Monday, we've found several sites offering reviews. Most have been pretty balanced.

Profilactic Launches - MySpace, YouTube, Digg Aggregated
Mashable.com

Profilactic: Aggregating you
Webby's World

Your Digital Life Aggregated
Profy.com

Preventing an online identity crisis
8hands blog

Profilactic combines social networks
Zieak's blog

Marc Canter, who coined the term "digital lifestyle aggregator" and founded Macromedia, mentioned Profilactic in his blog yesterday.

He said, "Profilactic sounds so - so - so named by a young person. How can that be a product? And a DLA in fact!" Nice.

Thanks to everyone who has written a review. If you find any others, please post them as comments here.

I conducted an interview with Michael Zhang over at Folksonomy.org. You can check it out here. BTW, if you want an 8x10 of my snazzy photo, just ask :)

OK, all of the initial beta tests can stop wearing those "I'm in the Profilactic beta and you're not!" t-shirts. We've opened the beta to the public and have deployed some snazzy new features and fixes.

The big addition is the Friends' Mashup. Now you can add someone to your Friends list and have their content feed into your Friend's Mashup. This is just the first phase, but I think it is still pretty cool. It pulls everything that your Friends have done over the past 14 days.

Other improvements include a performance boost for the mashup pages, support for more sites including Multiply, ma.gnolia, Pandora and Last.fm, grouping of similar items like Bookmarks, Dugg and Favorites, the ability to find other members like you (click on a tag in your profile page) and a few other little tidbits.

So tell your friends to sign up and start kicking the site around. And, as always, let us know what you think.

But remember, we're still in beta, so you may see a few things that are still a little rough around the edges. Just know that we're working hard to get those things worked out.

Thanks.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we are about to open up the beta to the public. We've just got to finish a couple of new features first.

Here is what will roll out with the public beta:

1. Support for several more sites including iLike, Multiply, ma.gnolia, Pandora and Last.fm
2. Smarting groupings of similar items in your mashup
3. Linking of your profile tags to search results so you can find other Profilactic members like you
4. Improved mashup performance
5. Friends' mashup!!!

The goal is to push this stuff out this week/over the weekend, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go ahead and get that list of friends together that you want to invite to try Profilactic.

We've been busy here at the Profilactic lair getting some new features ready. One of the ones I'm most excited about involves the mashup page.

We are going to be grouping similar items, like Bookmarks, Dugg and Favorites, into a single section in your mashup. So instead of having bookmarks scattered throughout your mashup, you will have one section (per day) where all of your bookmarks will be displayed. And this will work whether you use one site for your bookmarks or multiple sites. So if you have bookmarks on del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Blinklist, you'll get them all in one section labeled "Bookmarks."

You'll have the same thing for all of the items you digg and items that you favorite on sites like Vimeo.

And speaking of video, we will also automatically embed all of the videos that you upload to Vimeo or YouTube. That will make it easier for readers of your mashup to check out your stuff.

Here is a screenshot:

I've been updating our default site listings in the DB to include several sites suggested by beta users (and a few more that I like). Here are sites we are adding basic support for and/or enhancing our existing support for (* = existing sites):

1. iLike
2. ma.gnolia
3. Multiply
4. Pandora
5. Last.fm
6. GameSpot*
7. twitter
8. digg*

We hope to add more functionality around these sites soon, but I wanted to at least get these in the default site list so it makes them easier to add to your mashup and your WTFMO list.

These new sites should be live next week along with a bunch of other cool enhancements.

Last week, TechCrunch launched a forum section on their site. So I took the opportunity to ask for feedback on Profilactic.

Although we didn't get a ton of comments, the one thing that most posters had a problem with was the name. Personally, I am pretty pleased that the name is the only thing that people think sucks.

Here is what I posted in response:

"Come on, Curtis, admit it -- you had to Google "prophylactic" to get the proper spelling. :)

Seriously, though, there is a chance that someone could confuse the real word with our made-up one. However, a lot depends on how people hear about it. Because we are unknown, it is going to be through blogs or word-of-mouth.

If you read it in a blog, the spelling thing is a non issue because you'll be following a link.

If someone else tells you about it, they probably won't leave you hanging on the spelling. I remember back when I was telling everyone about Flickr (or even Zooomr or del.icio.us). Those sites required spelling help (i.e. you always had to say "Flickr with no e") in order to find them and they did alright for themselves.

In fact, of those three domains I just mentioned, only delicious.com points to the proper site. Flicker.com and Zoomer.com were already taken (and I assume lead to some of the naming choices).

The one thing we have noticed when talking to people about the site is that they will say "like Profile with actic at the end?" So we do have "profileactic.com" as well.

As I've said in other posts, the name could turn out to be a big hindrance or it could turn out to be something that people really remember as more and more of these types of services roll out this year. Hopefully it is the latter."

If you wanna chime in on the thread, here it is:
http://forums.techcrunch.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=87

We rolled out a couple of tweaks to friends and clippings:

1. Your tag filter dropdown menu on clippings is alphabetically ordered
2. The "Your Tags" section on the add a clipping page is now alphabetically ordered
3. Your friends page now shows the list of people who count you as a friend

http://www.profilactic.com/friends/smorty71

Just a little tip for our beta members: You can paste in widgets from other sites into your profile (where applicable).

For example, on my profile, I have added my iLike badge in my Music section and my XBOX Live Gamercard in my Video Games section. Check it out here:

http://www.profilactic.com/profile/smorty71

And I noticed that another beta member, Vince, has added his Last.fm badge to his profile.

http://www.profilactic.com/profile/Vince

If you've added any cool widgets to your profile, post a link in the comments. Also, any sites with widgets that you would like us to support? Let us know.

WIRED's "Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007" featured an interesting little nugget at the end of their list:

"MySpace Spaces Out
MySpace splinters as teens head for niche sites. New services that control profiles across multiple social networking sites begin to take off."

I hope they're right :) BTW, thanks to Kent for passing this along.