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.