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.