Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for 6 more music services: MOG, finetune, iJigg, mystrands, JamBase and Jamglue.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 169. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

With the release of Version 3 back in early March, we added a new feature on Profilactic that we referred to internally as "auto friend." Basically, if a site you add on Profilactic has a feed of your friends' content from that site, we'll automatically pull it in to your Friends' Mashup. No need for any of those friends to have a Profilactic account.

Of course, as with any of your friends' feeds, you can toggle any of the "auto friend" feeds on and off from the Manage friends' mashup page (select My Tools > Manage friends' mashup from the site header). This lets you tune your Friends' Mashup so you only get the content you want.

I realized recently that we a) haven't done a great job of getting the word out about the feature and b) haven't listed the sites that use it.

Sites that we automatically pull your friends' updates from:

1. Blinklist
2. Blippr
3. Delicious
4. digg
5. Facebook (very, very soon)
6. Flickr
7. Ma.gnolia
8. Propeller
9. Technorati
10. toluu
11. Twitter
12. Vox

We're going to be adding more as they become available. Look for FriendFeed support very soon.

If there is a site that offers a feed of your friends' content that we missed, drop us a comment. It was tough going back through 160+ sites to get them all.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for Twine.com. Twine is still in private beta, but those that are "in" can get started in Profilactic.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 163. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for toluu.com. toluu is still in private beta, so there may be a few hiccups early on; however, it looks like a very cool service.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 162. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for reputation management site Rapleaf.com. Thanks to Sonja Foust for the not-so-subtle suggestion.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 161. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for the wine enthusiast's social network Corkd.com. Thanks to Sonja Foust for the suggestion.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 160. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

We are working on a new video element for the home page where we'll show quick how-to videos about our features and share member testimonials about what they like about Profilactic.

If you'd like to share your thoughts on Profilactic, grab your webcam or Flip Video camera and shoot a short clip that answers the question, "What do you like about Profilactic?." We'll compile them all into a video that we'll feature on the home page.

You can throw your finished videos in our drop.io/profilacticvideo dropbox or upload them to the web. We prefer Vimeo because they allow users to download the original video file and they don't stick a logo on the videos.

So who's ready for their close-up?

BTW, if you're not down with shooting a video, you can always tell us what you like about Profilactic in the comments of this post. Thx.

We had been having issues with our del.icio.us feeds over the past few days. Just wanted to let everyone know that those issues are resolved. All del.icio.us feeds should be working again.

If anyone is still having a problem with them, please let us know at feedback at profilactic dot com.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for two more sites: Scribd and Plazes.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 159. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for Meetup.com. Meetup, unfortunately, doesn't give you an RSS feed of your meetups. However, you're still able to link to all of your Meetup content in your Where to Find Me Online list.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 157. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Read Write Web has an interview with Matt Galligan from socialthing! In the interview, he claims that socialthing! is actually different than services like FriendFeed (which is accurate) and Profilactic (which isn't quite) because we're trying to do different things.

He says "socialthing! is a digital life manager, a single place that you will go to manage the networks that you're a part of elsewhere." After mention Profilactic he adds, "It's because the services do very different things with those services. One is that we don't just aggregate a feed, but rather, aggregate your feed, all of your friends, and all of the things that they've been doing on those services. This is an incredible amount of more work. This means that there has to be a solid UI to support it, especially considering information overload."

It is obvious that Matt hasn't spent a lot of time on Profilactic, so I'll break down how our services are different tactically. However, it is important to point out that we are trying to do the same thing strategically. We are both trying to bring together everything you and your friends do on the web.

1. Profilactic supports 156 services

2. Profilactic supports RSS
This is a pretty glaring omission that no one has called socialthing! out on. They do not give you the ability to get your lifestream as an RSS feed.

Profilactic gives you feeds for your mashup, your friends' mashup and your clippings.

3. Profilactic offers Clippings
Clippings is a feature that no other lifestreaming service offers. It allows you to keep a digital scrapbook of what others are saying about you. So if you were in someone else's photo from SXSWi, you can grab that, with our handy delicious-esque bookmarklet, and put it in your Clippings.

Soon, we're going to be launching an "Auto Clip" feature that will allow you to specify a tag for us to watch from your existing bookmarking services. For example, if you tag everything about you on del.icio.us with "me," then we can look for the tag "me" and automatically add those items as Clippings.

4. Profilactic has badges
Profilactic gives you a Mashup badge and a Where to Find Me Online badge that allows you to place your content on your blog or website. It is a pretty handy way to let visitors of your blog know that you're also on Facebook or Flickr or Blip.tv.

You can see an example of both badges in the right column of my blog.

5. socialthing! only shows 50 items
My socialthing! lifestream only shows 50 items. I have tons of friends on dozens of networks, I would like to see more that 50 items.

My current Profilactic friends' mashup has almost 3,000 items in it. Sure, I'm not going to browse each one of those items; however, I might want to search or filter those items in some way to find something. Can't really do that with 50 items.

6. Profilactic gives you control over your friends' content
Matt from socialthing! talks alot about simplicity in his interview; however, some of socialthing!'s decisions seem simple for simplicity's sake.

Take the decision to not support friending. Matt says, "One distinction between us and all of our "competitors" is that there is actually no concept of "friend" on our site. If you're friends with somewhere on the social web, then you're friends on our site. The idea behind this was that there's just simply too much "friending" that exists on the web right now, and going and searching for your friends with every single new service that pops up is annoying and repetitive, so not requiring the user to do that was of utmost importance."

So with socialthing!, you're limited to getting the content that you know about from your friends. For example, if you and I are friends on Facebook, but not on the other 12 social sites that you use, I have no way to get access to that content on socialthing! Actually, I could get access to it; however, I would have to do the very thing that Matt says is annoying. I would have to go to those other 12 sites (not sure how I would find out which 12, though) and friend you. Then all of that stuff would show up in socialthing! Of course, if you add a friend on a site that socialthing! doesn't support, you're out of luck.

On Profilactic, we give you a couple of ways to get your friends' content. First, we pull any friend feeds from the services you add (just like socialthing! does). So if you add Flickr to Profilactic, we pull in your Photos from my Contacts feed.

However, we also give you the ability to friend someone on a more global level by offering friending as a site feature. So in the use case mentioned above, I would simply need to friend you on Profilactic to get access to everything you do online.

And because we give you control over which feeds you want to see from each of your friends, I could exclude the content I don't want to see.

Friending once and getting control over everything seems more simple *and* useful than excluding friending and claiming it as a user benefit.

Of course, friending on Profilactic requires that your friends are on Profilactic. In the next few weeks, we will be launching a couple of new features that will allow you to "globally" friend people who aren't on Profilactic. "Create a friend" will allow you to build a profile for someone. And if the person you want to add is already on FriendFeed, it will be as simple as plugging in their FF username.

7. socialthing! allows you to update other sites
socialthing! allows you to update your status on other sites like Facebook and Twitter. That is something that Profilactic currently doesn't do. We are, however, working on that functionality right now. And we're shooting to support more than the handful of sites that socialthing! currently does.

OK, so those are some of the differences (from our completely biased view) between Profilactic and socialthing!. Got more differences or disagree with something I said? Post them as a comment.

Scott Monty, who was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal, wrote a great review of Profilactic for Marketing Profs this week titled "Organizing Our Online Life."

Here is what he said about us:

"The aggregator to end all aggregators
The single most impressive social network / lifestream aggregator out there is, hands down, Profilactic. Supporting a whopping 155 sites & services, Profilactic allows you to slow the firehose of information coming at you by allowing you to selectively exclude updates within each of your friends' feeds. It's got a clippings feature that allows you collect information that you've created and that others have created about you - like a digital scrapbook. And finally, you can create a badge and post your information on your site.

When you add that they've just signed a six-figure deal with a major social network, it becomes even more impressive."

Scott Monty is now officially the wisest blogger on the planet (Sorry, Stan Schroeder).

I got an e-mail this morning from An De Jonghe. She has written a book on social networking called "Social Networks Around The World: How is Web 2.0 Changing Your Daily Life?"

An was writing to tell me that she featured Profilactic in her book.

Sure enough, if you go to Amazon and search inside the book, you will see that Profilactic is featured on pages 496 and 497. Thanks, An!

Check out the book on Amazon.

One of the coolest things about building this site, besides the thousands of people who are using it for their lifestream, is seeing people do interesting things with it.

Recently, we've seen a couple of our members create things to extend the Profilactic platform.

Anish Patel is working on a Wordpress plugin that allows you to add your Profilactic mashup as a tab in your Wordpress blog.

Neil Saunders has created a Greasemonkey script that lets you resize the images in your Profilactic mashup. We currently use the medium-sized images from the Flickr feed. He gives you the option to use the smaller 120px version.

Thanks, Anish and Neil!

Over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of coverage of FriendFeed. So, naturally, people have started to ask us how Profilactic is different from FriendFeed.

In order to eliminate some of the confusion, I've decided to break it down really quickly.

1. Number of services supported
FriendFeed supports 28 social sites. Profilactic supports 155. Not much else to say there.

Both services support the ability to add custom sites for things like your blog; however, Profilactic allows you to also add custom links to the default services we support.

For example, when you add your Facebook account in Profilactic, the link to your Facebook profile will appear in your Where to Find Me Online list. But what if you wanted to add a link to one of your Fan pages or some other page in Facebook that you created? With Profilactic, you can add that link and group it with the set of links we add for Facebook by default. I've added a link to our Profilactic fan page under my Facebook account.

2. Ability to filter your friends' content
On FriendFeed, there is no way to filter out any of your friends' content. For example, if one of your friends posts really bad Flickr photos or adds 100 Twitter messages per day, you're stuck seeing them all in FriendFeed.

On Profilactic, you can exclude any feed that you want from each of your friends. So if your best friend's blog posts aren't your thing, you can turn them off. We think the ability to filter out what you consider noise is important.

3. Clippings
One of the features that people often overlook (or maybe don't understand) on Profilactic is our Clippings feature.

Think of it as a personal web scrapbook where you grab items that other people write or create about you. For example, if you went to SXSW and someone took a picture of you and uploaded it to Flickr, you could add that to your Clippings. Or if someone mentions you in their blog post, you could add that to your Clippings.

I found this feature especially useful during and after SXSW. I ended up in a ton of photos and several blog posts. With Clippings I was able to capture and tag all of that stuff in one place.

We think Clippings is the perfect complement to the Mashup. You get the things you create and all of the things that others have created about you.

4. Badges
Profilactic allows you to take certain elements from our site, like your Mashup and your Where to Find Me Online list, and embed them on your blog or website. These allow visitors of your site to get a better understanding of where else you are on the web and what other content you're producing.

So to recap, Profilactic supports 127 more sites than FriendFeed. We allow you to filter out your friends' feeds that you don't want to see. We give you features that FriendFeed doesn't offer like Clippings. And we allow you to take it all with you with badges.

Profilactic has been chosen to power a new lifestreaming project from one of the largest social networks in the U.S. We can't disclose the site until the ink is dry on the agreement; however, we are super-excited to be working with such a great group on our first major licensing deal.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for 5 more sites: UK recommendations site Qype, video sharing site Revver, social bookmarking site Simpy, slideshow sharing site SlideShare and German Digg clone Y!gg.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 155. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for 2 more sites: Dailymotion and The Hype Machine.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 150. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for 4 more sites: Lijit, Wakoopa, MeasuredUp and Skitch.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 148. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

There have been a couple of blog posts lately that show how the various social media aggregators and lifestreaming services stack up to each other.

The first was CNET Webware's preview of socialthing! At the end of the post, they include the following chart. It shows that we support the most social sites (by more than 100) and that we are the most "mature."



Then, in Dan Taylor's review of social media aggregators and lifestreaming services (you know, the one where he named us #1), he has chart comparing which services support which sites.

We're in the process of adding all of the services that we aren't covering from Dan's chart. Look for those in a few days.

OK, I know we've covered the name thing before. The first time was way back in 2006. However, recently, people have been getting all riled up about it again, so I feel it is worth mentioning.

Profilactic (or the real word "prophylactic") is not a "dirty" word. It is not a "sexual" word. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

It means "tending to prevent or ward off : preventive."

Sure, the idea was to have a memorable name; however, it was still supposed to be related to our tagline and goal of "preventing an online identity crisis."

So get your heads out of the gutter...

I got a nice surprise upon returning from SXSWi this morning. I found a Google alert for Dan Taylor's review of social media aggregators and lifestreaming services.

Dan named Profilactic #1 ahead of sites like FriendFeed (#3), Iminta (#4) and Plaxo Pulse (#5). Here is what he said:

"Launched way back in 2006, Profilactic is the daddy of social aggregators, not least because it's notched up support for an astonishing 144 services. It also has a decent UI and some nice bits of functionality, including search and filtering of your 'mashup' (poor choice of label imo - too many other connotations). I also like the fact that it pulls in decent sized Flickr images rather than thumbnails, although I guess that's just personal preference and others may feel they take up too much space. Perhaps Profilactic's most compelling feature (now shared by newcomer socialthing!) is that it automatically draws on your friend lists from the services you add rather than forcing you to add them manually, which removes a massive barrier to take up.

Pros: number of services supported, search & filtering, large Flickr photos, automatically pulls in friends from other services
Cons: Lacks the design elegance of socialthing!"

He gave us 5 stars for features, ease of use and overall while giving us 4 stars on design which is not surprising since we don't actually have a designer on the team :)

This serves as validation of what we've been working so hard to build over the past couple of years. It also makes us feel good to know that our bootstrapped, part-time project beat out heavily-funded, full-time projects like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.

Thanks again, Dan!

Just wanted to let everyone know that Profilactic has added support for Listal and Blippr.

This brings the total number of sites that Profilactic supports to 144. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

We got another great write up today from Michelle Jones over at Forge Louisville. She mentions all of the buzz we've been getting for Profilactic lately including SXSWm's use of Profilactic to share their experiences at SXSW and Download Squad's mention of us a couple of days ago.

Last week, Michelle published an interview I did with her about Profilactic that covered everything from the name to our team to our plans for world domination.

Thanks, Michelle!

I was going to ask the question, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?"

The good news, of course, would have been that we're seeing big surges in users, sign ups and pageviews over the past few days. Our daily sign up average is up over 1,600% since last week. The more members we have, the more friends you can make and the more cool content you can discover, etc.

The bad news is that all of this new activity has put a strain on the ol' Profilactic servers. Over the past 24-48 hours, we've had a couple of outages due to the volume of traffic and the amount of data being aggregated and mashed up.

We are working on fixes for all of these issues now; however, there may be some flakiness over the next day or so while we get everything ironed out. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Good thing there isn't a huge interactive festival coming up this week...

Thanks to this helpful tip on bittbox.com, we have added a Profilactic WebClip icon to the site. If you add Profilactic to your iPhone or iPod Touch home screen, you'll get this snazzy Profilactic "p" icon.


Thanks to Matt Cleary for taking this photo
of Profilactic on his iPhone.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have updated the look of the Profilactic home page. The original home page was really bad. We think this one is an order of magnitude less bad. Let us know what you think.

I went on a site-adding spree last night. First, I wanted to add some of the sites that MyBlogLog had in New with Me that we were missing. Then, I wanted to add some of the sites that Read Write Web included in their excellent list of social aggregators and lifestreaming services.

I didn't get all of them added yet; however, I got the following 7: Onaswarm (#136), Correlate.us (#137), iStalkr (#138), Identoo (#139), Suprglu (#140), Life2Front (#141) and Wink (#142).

As you can tell from my clever use of parentheses, that brings the total number of sites Profilactic supports by default to 142. Of course, you can still add unlimited custom sites.

OK, I've posted a couple of times over the years about my tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory concerning TechCrunch and Profilactic. Basically, they never mention Profilactic when they cover other social media aggregators and lifestreaming services. Plus, they don't allow my comments when I try to mention anything about Profilactic in their posts about other aggregators.

Today was probably the best example. Just after Mashable named us one of the two best lifestreaming services, TechCrunch does their review of MyBlogLog's New with Me where they mention the following:

"If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well."

They mention practically every other service except for Profilactic.

I've posted a comment mentioning that we've been around as long as Facebook's news feed and that we were just singled out by Mashable. Will be interesting to see if they let it through this time. Should be the 16th ot 17th on the list.

[UPDATE:] 24 hours after I posted that comment, it has yet to show up. Sigh...