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, December 30, 2007

Profilactic adds support for Utterz (#111)
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for moblog service Utterz.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 111. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Profilactic adds support for Glogster (#110)
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for poster site Glogster. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with Glogster; however, whatever you do with it, you can now do it on Profilactic, too.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 110. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Profilactic adds support for Break.com (#109)
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for video site Break.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 109. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Happy Holidays from the Profilactic team
Just wanted to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season. Thanks to everyone who has helped us improve and grow Profilactic over the past year. We really appreciate it.

The Profilactic lair will be operating at half capacity over the next few days; however, we will be rolling out some snazzy new features before the end of the year that we hope you will all enjoy.

Happy Holidays!

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Profilactic adds support for vodpod (#107) and upcoming (#108)
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for video sharing site vodpod and Yahoo!'s event site upcoming.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 108. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Profilactic adds support for Soup (#106)
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for mashup service Soup. Soup is pretty much a clone of Tumblr and somewhat of a competitor to our Mashup feature.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 106. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Pulling support for RSS feeds from 43 Things, 43 People
I've noticed (thanks to Chris Messina) that feeds from 43 Things and 43 People are causing display problems in our mashups.

After looking at the feeds from 43, they are inserting blank items in their feeds when the user doesn't have enough content of their own. Our mashups are pulling in those blank items.

See Chris' screenshot for an example of what happens with a 43 People feed.

Also, Chris screen has revealed a minor display bug that is affecting Safari users. We will have that fixed right away.

I'll post an update once we get a workaround for the 43 Things and 43 People feed issue.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Mahalo adds RSS feeds for Profilactic
We've gotta give a quick shout out to Jason Calacanis, Sean Percival and the rest of the Mahalo team. After seeing a Twitter update that I posted about our support for Mahalo (and the lack of RSS feeds for the user profiles), Jason and Sean got in touch with us to find out what we needed.

Today, I got a follow-up from Sean to let me know that they have added RSS feeds to the Mahalo profiles for the following info:

Recommended links
Links submitted by friends
Friends
Fans
Fans of

I am going to update the Profilactic site db with those feeds now. They should be available in your mashup by the end of the day.

Thanks again, Mahalo team!
Profilactic adds support for 5 more sites
Just yesterday, we hit our goal of 100 default sites supported. Today, we have added support for 5 more sites: vi.sualize.us, digFoot, Capazoo, Tweeterboard and Rock Band.

These bring our total to 105 (in case you couldn't do the math yourself). Of course, we still support unlimited custom sites.

Keep the suggestions coming. Many of the recent additions have been submitted by dutiful Profilactic members (that's supposed to make you feel guilty, btw).

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Profilactic now supports 100 default sites
A few weeks ago, we gave ourselves the goal of supporting 100 default sites by the end of 2007.

This afternoon, we added support for 3 more sites: All Consuming, Lists of Bests and 43 Places. That brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 100.

Not to brag (too much); but, there is no other site that comes close to supporting the number and variety of sites that we do.

Of course, we still support unlimited custom sites, so we essentially support any site that you can throw at us.

We will continue to add support for new sites throughout the rest of 2007 and into 2008, so keep your suggestions coming.
Profilactic to offer social graph management
Anyone who is familiar with Profilactic knows that we offer the Friends' Mashup. It aggregates all of the stuff that your Profilactic friends contribute all over the web. It is a pretty cool feature (just ask the guys at Spokeo).

One of the things that has been missing from the Friends' Mashup is the ability to exclude feeds that you're not interested in. For example, if you have added me as a friend (you have added me, right?) and you find that my Flickr photos annoy you, but you can't live without my Twitter updates, you can't really do anything about it.

Our upcoming "social graph manager" (we'll come up with a better name) will allow you to exclude my Flickr photos while still getting all of my Twitter updates that make your day complete. So your Friends' Mashup will contain only the information you really care about.

In addition, we'll be adding a new "auto friend" feature that will give you the option to pull in friend content from other networks, even if those friends aren't on Profilactic yet. So if you add Flickr as one of your sites, we'll give you the option to add the Photos from my Contacts feed into your Friends' Mashup. Currently, there are around 15 of our 97 sites, including Flickr, Twitter, ma.gnolia, Vox, Technorati, digg and Del.icio.us, that offer these types of feeds.

We think these new features will give Profilactic the most complete set of features for staying up-to-date with what your friends are doing online.

Let us know what you think.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Profilactic adds support for orkut
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for Google's orkut. So if you're in Brazil, make sure you add it to your Profilactic sites :)

This brings the total number of sites supported to 97. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

As we mentioned earlier, our goal is to support at least 100 sites by the end of the year. Please post your suggestions as a comment.

[UPDATE] Thanks to Snook for pointing out my capitalization mistake with orkut.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Profilactic adds support for Mahalo
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for social search site Mahalo. Unfortunately, Mahalo doesn't offer RSS for their user profile section, so you will only be able to link to your Mahalo profile right now.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 96. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

As we mentioned earlier, our goal is to support at least 100 sites by the end of the year. Please post your suggestions as a comment.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Profilactic turns 1
It was a year ago today that we officially launched Profilactic to the public. It had been a long time in the making; however, it has just been a year since anyone outside of the lair has been able to use it.

I'm sure it's tough to remember your life without it. I find myself putting "B.P." on any date prior to 12/8/2006.

Unlike most of the sites that we aggregate, we will be around for a while (we kid, Spokeo, we kid!). We're self-funded and pretty stubborn.

So take a minute to reflect on what Profilactic has meant to you over the past year... then send gifts to the address below (You can combine our birthday and Christmas gifts into one larger gift if you prefer). On second thought, our P.O. box is pretty small, you're better off sending cash.

P.O. Box 22404,
Louisville, KY 40252

Of course, you could be a cheap-ass and just leave a "Happy Birthday" comment...

All kidding aside, it's been a great year for us. We've learned a lot and had a lot of fun. We appreciate everyone who has helped us work out the kinks and spread the word over the past year. We have some big plans for 2008. Look for more on that in a couple of weeks.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Profilactic adds support for 5 more sites
Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for 5 new sites: eBay, Friendster, Stage 6, Xfire and Zune.

This brings the total number of sites supported to 95. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

A big thanks goes out to Gryphon for suggesting all of these sites.

As we mentioned earlier, our goal is to support at least 100 sites by the end of the year. Please post your suggestions as a comment.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Check out Profilactic on DailyIdea.tv
Our friends over at DailyIdea.tv created a great video ad for Profilactic that is featured in today's Daily Idea video titled "What Type of Social Networking User Are You?" Check it out below. Make sure you watch until the end to see our spot.




Thanks to DI's Todd Earwood for pulling this together. BTW, I'm a Goldilocks. You?

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