Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic now supports Profile Builder, the new identity management service that launched this weekend at the TechCrunch party.

The service still seems buggy and the pages are littered with typos; however, if that's your thing, you can add them to your Profilactic pages.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have added support for MyBlogLog and Cluztr. If you're using these services, you can now add them to Profilactic.

TechCrunch posted an overview of Profile Builder, an online identity startup that launched at the TC party this weekend, and, in it, gave a shout out to Profilactic.

Of course, they pointed to a dead link in their post (and the link was to their forums, not our site); however, I'm sure those sticklers for detail over at TechCrunch will fix that right away. And if not, it's the thought that counts, right?

Today, we added support for 5 video sharing sites: Viddler, Pickle, Dabble, Blip.tv and Sevenload which was named Germany's 2006 Website of the Year.

Viddler, Dabble and Sevenload have full support. We can link to your profile and pull in all of your content.

Because Pickle and Blip.tv don't have friendly URLs, except for your profile page, all we can do is provide links to your Pickle and Blip.tv profiles.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have added very basic support for Yelp!. You can link to your Yelp! page and that's about it. Yelp! doesn't use friendly URLs for their RSS feeds or other pages within your profile, so a link is all we can do.

Still, if you use Yelp!, now you can add it to your profile and have it show up in your Where to Find Me Online list and badge.

That brings our total number of default sites supported to 48. Custom sites are still unlimited :)

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have added support for two gaming social networks: Curse and Kongregate.

You can learn more about Curse.com here and more about Kongregate here.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have added support for Ustream.tv. This brings the total number of default sites Profilactic supports to 45 or so. Of course, you can add an unlimited number of custom sites, too.

A lot of sites and services are popping up in the "digital lifestyle aggregation" space. I'd like to take a few minutes to explain our approach and why we think it's a good one.

I don't want to name names or trash-talk anyone else's site. I just want to clearly articulate what we see as our value proposition, especially as it applies to overall approaches many other sites are taking.

Random boxes vs. thoughtful aggregation
The biggest difference between Profilactic and many other sites that allow you to aggregate your social networking data is how we present your data.

Lots of sites have opted for the random box approach to aggregation where you can add lots of widgets and boxes of content to your page.

Profilactic is taking a different approach. We feel that, as the product team, we must add value to the experience by making your data more useful/usable coming out of our site in aggregate than it was coming in individually. Otherwise, what's the point?

So instead of having a bunch of random boxes from each of your various social networks, we provide you with an aggregated stream of your content, often grouped by type, ordered chronologically. You can quickly see what someone has posted today, whether its on Twitter or Flickr or del.icio.us, while having search and filtering tools to find older items as well.

In our opinion, that's inherently more useful than a page with 10 disconnected boxes and provides much more long-term value.

Walled garden v. open network
Many of the biggest social networks want you to create lots of content for their network; however, they don't want to let you use it elsewhere.

Profilactic is trying to establish *the place* for you to display all of your content on the web, so your mashup, clippings and profile pages are open to anyone.

In addition, we provide RSS feeds of all of your content so you can access it in an RSS reader instead of visiting the site.

We also provide badges that allow you to take your Profilactic content and display it on your own blog or website.

Engineered frustration v. ease of use
Some much of what happens on other social networks is what I call "engineered frustration." These are actions or functions of the site that are intentionally more difficult than they need to be. Why? To drive traffic back to the site.

The worst one is the e-mail alert that provides absolutely no content. Do I want to know when my friends create new content or send me a message? Sure I do. However, I don't want a useless e-mail that provides no content and says, "SoAndSo has sent you a message! Click here to read your it."

There is no reason not to include the content of the message in the e-mail. After all, the point of the service is to useful to your members, right?

Profilactic offers our members a Daily Digest e-mail that summarizes what all of your friends have published over the past 24 hours in one (and only one) e-mail. And instead of linking to some abstract page on our site just to get a page view, we send you directly to the content on whatever network it was published on. Why? Because that is what our members want.

We also strive to make sure every process on our site is the easiest to use. Whether it is signing up, setting up your sites or managing your friends, we're trying to create a service that makes you more efficient and respects your time, not one that wastes it with engineered frustration.

OK, that's enough for now. We have a snarky reputation to maintain, so we promise not to get all Jack Handey on you for a while. We just wanted to take a few minutes to explain our approach to building Profilactic.

As always, please let us know what you think at feedback at profilactic dot com.

OK, after months of forum trolling to tell the world how Spokeo and Profilactic were in competition with each other, Harrison Tang of Spokeo tells Steve O'Hear of ZDNet that we are NOT in competition with each other. Whew! That's a relief...

Yesterday, we added support for both Google Reader Shared Items and CoComment. If you use either of those services, head over to your Site Setup page and add them.

One note about Google Reader, though. Instead of your username, you will need to enter the really long string shown on your Shared view in Google Reader.



Simply paste that number into the username field on the site setup page.

BTW, we have also created "Shared" and "Comments" sections for each in the Mashup and Friends' Mashup. These sections pull together all comments or shared items for a given day.

Check out my mashup to see them in action.

We have created a Twitter account for Profilactic and will be feeding in posts from this blog using Twitterfeed. So if you wanna keep up to date with what we're working on, add us on Twitter.

OK, now that Version 2 is out the door, it is time to start working on our next batch of features and enhancements. Instead of a big version release, though, we will return to rolling out small batches of features every couple of weeks.

Here is what is in the queue now:

1. Mashup badge - We are creating a Mashup badge similar to our Where to Find Me Online badge. It will allow you to embed the latest items from your mashup on your blog or website.

2. Facebook app - We are creating a Facebook app that pulls in your Profilactic Mashup and your Where to Find Me Online list.

3. Better Friends management - We are working on several features that will allow you to better manage your friends and their content.

We will add the ability to invite friends and automatically link you to those friends once they sign up. This is pretty basic functionality, but we just haven't gotten around to it yet.

We will also give you the ability to pick and choose which feeds flow into your Friends' Mashup. So if you like someone's photos, but hate their Twitter updates, you will be able to exclude them. I can't wait for this one.

We will also allow you to pull in items from your Friends on other networks regardless of whether they have a Profilactic membership. So, if you have a Flickr account, we will give you the option to pull in your Photos from my Contacts feed.

4. New home page - We are going to make the home page of the site more useful by showing you your usage stats (how much content you're creating on a daily or weekly basis), allow you to meet new/interesting Profilactic members and get the latest tips and how-tos on our new features.

There are literally dozens of other improvements in our queue, but those are the ones that we're focusing on right now.

Please let us know what you think, especially if there is something we've missed.

Wow, what a day yesterday was for Profilactic. Nothing like launching a new version and having a major site name you as one of the worst-named web apps of all-time to get the traffic flowing.


Traffic by day for July 2007. Can anyone figure out when the launch was?

Of course, I'm referring to the Read/WriteWeb piece from yesterday. It has been dugg over 650 times as of this posting. Of course, several R/WW commenters came to our defense and claimed to like the name.

We also got a ton of blog love from the launch announcement, too.

And to top it off, this morning, Mashable posted a comprehensive list of social network aggregators. Profilactic was at the top of that list, so we should be pretty good visibility there as well.

Thanks to everyone who is helping to spread the word. More good stuff to come.

The braintrust over at Read/Write Web has compiled a "fun" list of the Worst Web App Names. Profilactic comes in at #2. Damn it, always a bridesmaid!

Now we can only dream about what doors the title of Worst Web App Name could have opened.

BTW, I know the list said "in no particular order;" however we're gonna milk this for all it's worth.

If you wanna digg the story about our "honor," you can do that here.

One of the new features of Version 2 that I really like is the Profilactic Daily Digest. It is a once-a-day e-mail alert that sends you all of your friends' content directly to your inbox.

And because we're not ad-supported, the Daily Digest sends you directly to your friend's content on whatever network it was published on. So if your friend posted a photo to Flickr, the e-mail link will send you directly to Flickr, not through some crumby Profilactic interstitial or summary page.

To enable your Profilactic Daily Digest, go to your Account Settings page (it's the last item in the My Tools menu in the header) and check the box that says "Send me a daily digest of my Friends' Mashup."

The next morning, you should have one waiting in your inbox.

NOTE: I have been monkeying around with the template to make sure it looks good in the various e-mail clients. This morning, I succeeded in creating a version that didn't look good in any e-mail client. So don't judge the new feature by this morning's... and possible tomorrow morning's :)... send.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or suggestions at feedback at profilactic dot com.

We made it! Version 2 is live and everything seems to be working properly (with the exception of this blog template which I forgot to update).

We'll be rolling out the rest of the v2 features over the weekend and will start the big promotional push (crap, we have no marketing department!) on Monday.

To get the ball rolling, you *could* go ahead and digg this.

We are doing a soft launch of Version 2 of Profilactic. We'll be pushing out the majority of the new features (and the new UI) tonight around 10PM EST; however, we will be adding a few more things over the course of the weekend.

The official launch is scheduled for Monday. We would love for you to check things out over the weekend to make sure things are working as they should... and to prepare the glowing review of the new site for your own blog :)

As always, please send all feedback, questions and/or complaints to feedback at profilactic dot com.

I know we've been a little quiet recently; however, we've been hunkered down working hard on the next release of Profilactic. The new UI is done and we are starting to QA some of the new features, so expect an update/ETA next week.