We added support for SocialURL today. The inspiration was SocialURL's Henri who posted this little rant on TechCrunch this morning:

"Here at SocialURL we’ve been addressing the very same things and in development of similar protocals. I’ve spoken to TechCrunch employees and there must be some favoritism taking place there to just mentioning “Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster” when none of these have the traction we have at SocialURL (even without the help of TechCrunch)."

I just want Henri to know that we're here for him (even if he wants to be a playa hata). That's just how we roll.

Of course, if any of you are actually using SocialURL, you can now add that to your Profilactic pages.

Nick Gonzalez mentioned us again in a follow-up post on ProfileBuilder.

As with previous TechCrunch coverage, we aren't really like the site that they are comparing us to; however, we appreciate any coverage we can get.

It would be nice if they could actually do a post on us *and* actually link to our site (HINT! HINT!).

Just watched Robert Scoble's interview with the guys from Plaxo. Apparently, they are launching an online identity aggregator that allows you to bring together everything you and your friends do online.

Check out the video here.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic now supports video-sharing site Veoh and photo-sharing site Fotolog.

Unfortunately, Veoh doesn't do much with RSS so there isn't much to put in your mashup; however, you can link to your profile, your videos, your favorites and your channels in your Where to Find Me Online list.

With Fotolog, you can add a link to your daily photo page and your favorite photos. Your daily photo will also be pulled into your mashup via their RSS feed. BTW, Fotolog was acquired yesterday by Hi-Media for $90 million.

That brings out default site list up to 61. Of course, we still support unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we added support for the creative community RedBubble today. By providing your RedBubble username, we will link to your profile, your art, your blog, your watchlist and your favorites. We will also import items from your art and blog into your mashup.

That brings out default site list up to 59, I think. Of course, we still support unlimited custom sites.

One of the big projects we planned for Profilactic after our v2 launch was a Facebook app. All the cool kids are making them. And if you were listening to those wacky web pundits like Robert Scoble, you would know that it was only a matter of time before FB absorbed the entire internet... and e-mail, too. So we didn't really have a choice, right? :)

Now, as we've been tinkering with the app and I've been reading more about how successful (or should I say "unsuccessful") the majority of Facebook apps are, I'm starting to have second thoughts.

Compound that with the fact that I don't really like Facebook or their platform and I'm torn about whether to move ahead.

So I'm going to pose the questions to the Profilactic faithful. Should Profilactic be in Facebook at all? And would you get any *real* value out of our app or would it just be something you add to your page and forget about (like all of the apps I've tried)?

The idea is to give users access to their mashup and their WTFMO list. Considering that we already give you badges for those elements that you can put on your own websites or blogs, is a FB version really needed?

We want to make sure that we are applying our limited resources to the right areas. I have a hunch that Facebook isn't one of those areas. Tell us what you think.

South by Southwest 2008 is coming up in March, so, today, I submitted Profilactic for consideration for a Web Award. I figured for $10 we didn't have much to lose. If you wanna submit your site, do it here.

My friend and former colleague, Bill Johnston of Forum One, responded to one of my Twitter posts yesterday and it got me thinking (I usually don't think on Sunday, so this is noteworthy).

He said, "BTW - I think we are in the Hair Metal era of online community, a.k.a social media, a.k.a. online collaboration"

So, I replied, "If that is true, then Profilactic wants to be Faster Pussycat... or maybe Dokken."

Why Dokken you might be asking (if you're asking "Who the hell is Dokken?," then I've got nothing for you)? Well, Don, Jeff, George and Mick (almost makes them sound like the Beatles when you say it that way) were a solid, hard-working hair metal band that were in their prime from 1983 until about 1987. They had catchy pop metal songs and always put on a pretty good show. They weren't as big as Bon Jovi, but they were bigger than Britny Fox.

I think that pretty much describes what we're hoping to do with Profilactic. We want to have a good run, build a solid product and put on a good show. We may wear some really bad outfits from time to time; but, 3 of us are engineers, so that should be expected. We don't want to be the next Facebook, but we do want to be bigger than Britny Fox (that's a coincidence, huh?).

So are we way off base here? Do you think we're more like L.A. Guns, perhaps? Maybe Cinderella? As long as you don't say "Nelson" or "White Lion," we're cool with that.

You know how we said that we were supporting the Facebook RSS feed for your Mini-Feed? Well... we've run into a couple snags that are making it flake out for some users.

Rather than have a bad user experience floating around out there, we are pulling out the RSS support for the moment. You can still link to your FB profile, but we won't be importing your status into your Mashup until we can get this working correctly for all users.

Sorry for the ol' switcheroo on this, but we'd rather get it right.

Now that Facebook has added RSS feeds for your Mini-Feed, we have decided to add basic support for Facebook on Profilactic.

The only catch is that you need to paste your user id, instead of your username, into the site setup page.

Your Facebook URL should look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500320191

Simply grab the id on the end of *your own* URL and paste it in the username field.



Right now, we are just supporting a link to your Facebook profile and the import of your Mini-Feed. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Last night, we pushed out a handful of enhancements to Profilactic. Here is a quick rundown to what we launched:

1. JavaScript mashup badge
You can now take your Mashup content with you by copying and pasting a code snippet into your blog or website. The badge displays your most recent 7 Mashup items. See a sample in the right column of my blog.

2. Clippings - Mashup integration
That's a fancy way of saying that, when you add a clipping to Profilactic, that will be noted in your mashup.

3. Support for timezones
You can now specify which timezone you will live in. This is useful for getting all of your mashup entries, especially from sites like twitter or Jaiku, to have the right timestamp. You can set your timezone on your Edit Profile page.

Of course, because we're crafty, we also added a little code that will look at what timezone your computer is set to. If you don't set the timezone yourself, we'll take our best guess at it.

4. Improved Mashup and Clippings display
We made a few tweaks to the fonts and styles that control the Mashup and Clippings pages. The new pages are easier to read and scan.

5. Default favicon
If you add a custom site, we now have a default favicon that will get display next to the site name. This is a minor tweak; however, it makes the Where to Find Me Online list look better.

6. Loading indicator on Set up Sites page
We added a loading cursor to the Set up Sites page. Again, this isn't a huge deal; however, it is a helpful feedback mechanism as you are adding sites to your profile.

If you have any questions or comments, contact us at feedback at profilactic dot com.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we added support for Polar Rose this morning. In case you don't know, Polar Rose is a photo claiming service that lets you label people within photos. It's a really cool concept and fits nicely with our idea of Clippings.

Anyway, if you're a Polar Rose user, you can now add it to your Profilactic pages.

For those keeping score at home, that brings the total number of default sites supported to 57. The number of custom sites is still unlimited.