Building Profilactic

Profilactic is a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online. This blog chronicles the processing of building it.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

New design for WTFMO badge
We created a new design for our Where To Find Me Online badge. If you're using the WTFMO badge already, grab the latest code here. BTW, once you update to the newest badge, you will automatically receive any updates or changes we make.

If you wanna see the badge in action, check out the right column of my blog.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Cybette needs friends
One of our members (and a great beta tester), cybette, has posted an appeal for Profilactic friends on her Vox blog.

Check out her mashup and, if you're feeling friendly, add her as a friend.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Jaiku and tumblr support coming to Profilactic
Fresh on the heels of adding twitter support, we are QAing support for Jaiku and tumblr. Should have something later this week.

Of course, if you're reposting your twitter feed through Jaiku, you're Mashup will look like doo-doo; however, that's more of a personal problem.

I'll post an update when it goes live.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Profilactic now supports twitter
You can now add twitter to the list of sites that we fully support on Profilactic. Over the weekend, we added in the ability to get your twitter updates in your Mashup. See my mashup for an example.

Of course, if your Profilactic friends are using twitter, their updates will show up in your Friends' Mashup, too.

And with our next release (probably some time next month), we will added your twitter Friends timeline to your Friends' Mashup. This will allow you to get updates fro twitter-ers who aren't Profilactic members (yet).

NOTE: If you already have twitter setup in your sites list and you aren't seeing your updates, go to the Setup Sites page and remove and re-add twitter. That should solve the problem.

So try it out and let us know what you think (or what we should add or tweak) by posting a comment.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Integrating twitter
Just wanted to post a quick update to let everyone know that we are in the process of integrating twitter into Profilactic.com. It will work for your own mashup as well as your Friends' mashup.

We have it up and running in dev right now. There are a few minor UI tweaks to go. Should have some more info on a release date later this weekend.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Profilactic mentioned on TechCrunch
Nick Gonzalez did a review of Loopster and Profilactic got a brief mention. Here is what he said:

"Loopster is the newest application, along with Profilactic and ProfileLinker, trying to help people wrangle these disparate networks into an easily consumable, unified format.

Profilactic focuses on aggregating your social network data and creating feeds that are mashups of the different content you and your friends produce (MySpace blogs, Dugg stories, etc.).
"

The only bad thing is that he didn't link to our site. He linked to a forum post I did on the TC Forums asking for feedback on Profilactic. Oh, well. Better than no mention at all.
Profilactic is now barely out of beta!
This morning, we pushed out a bunch of tweaks, features and enhancements that takes Profilactic.com barely out of beta. Can't decide if we should call it "Barely 1.0" or "Barely out of beta." Guess, we'll have to think on that.

Profilactic is now (barely) 1.0

Anyway, here is what is new:

1. Faster mashups!
We've reworked the mashup code to make it much faster than before, especially when you're moving around on the site in the same session.

2. Archive
As part of the mashup rework, we are now saving all of the content you feed into the mashup. So 6 months from now, if you wanna find something you blogged about, you can search for it in your mashup. We'll be building this out more later; however, for now, take comfort in the fact that we have all of your stuff (wait, is that comforting? anyway...)

3. Search
Speaking of search, we've added some new search options. Mashup, Friends' Mashup, Clippings and People can all be searched now. The People Search is located in the header on all pages. The other searches are on their respective pages next to the filter options.

4. Favicons on WTFMO lists
This is a minor thing, but I think it makes the page look really snazzy. We're now pulling in the favicons for the sites in our default sites list.

5. Likeness
One of the totally new features in this release is Likeness. It helps you figure out which people you see on Profilactic are like you (and how much like you they are). It is a great way to find people to follow in your Friends' Mashup.

Some of the things we look at for likeness are your profile tags, your sites, your friends and the content you've bookmarked or dugg recently. If you are logged into the site, check out this page to see what it looks like:

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

You can see the likeness score for any member in the signature area of their pages (to the right of their username and avatar photo). See mine here:

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

I think that about covers it. So take a look at the new stuff and let us know what you think.

We're already hard at work on our next release (which will hopefully be ready in the next 30-45 days). It will have some of these long-awaited features:

1. Custom subheadings for your sites
2. Support for multiple accounts for the same site
3. Better twitter integration in mashups
4. Ability to choose what types of content (configurable per friend) shows up in your Friends' mashup
5. E-mail digest of Friends' mashup

As always, please send any bug reports to feedback at profilactic dot com.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Remember when I said April 1st...
would be the day we launched so cool new stuff on the site? Well, we didn't quite make it. So instead of rushing things out that aren't quite ready, we are going to wait (probably until next weekend). Sorry.

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