Profilactic – Aggregating Your Online Identity

Profilactic is a lifestreaming application. This just means it aggregates all your online activities into a single location that can be shared with others. What makes Profilactic stand out from other similar sites is the sheer number of sites it supports – nearly 200, and the number is growing by the week. When you join Profilactic, you can add sites specializing in books, music and video, sites for social networking and business networking, and much more. Adding sites is as easy as choosing from a dropdown list and typing in your username. Even if a particular site isn’t supported, you can add it yourself by typing the name, URL, and RSS feed URL. You can also link feeds from the same site together. Once that’s done, you can customize how the sites appear and build your lifestream.

Profilactic allows you to setup a profile, add friends, become someone’s fan, and add clippings of useful links you find on the web. You can also comment on items found on friends’ profiles. You can follow friends’ and fans’ lifestreams and subscribe to these using a single combined RSS feed. Profilactic does exactly what it promises by making it easy to manage your online presence from a single location.

Practical Uses

• Build your personal brand repertoire with a single location for your online activity
• Create more dedicated fans of your blog by using the Profilactic widget which directs users all of your content across the web
• Search through your status updates, posts, and comments to create a comprehensive picture of your family’s holiday adventures

Insider Tips

• When you add sites to your profile, decide whether they should also be included in your lifestream
• Add links to your blog posts and blog comments feed under the same heading to make it easy to tie them together

What We Liked

• It’s possible to comment on any item from within the Profilactic interface
• You can decide which parts of your online identity are included in your lifestream
• Filtering is easily enabled within Profilactic

What We Didn’t Like

• If you include a lot of sites, generating (and refreshing) your lifestream can be slow
• There are occasional glitches with loading feeds from certain sites

Alternatives

• Friendfeed – http://friendfeed.com
• Iminta – http://iminta.com
• MyLifeOnline – http://mylifeonline.com

Company Info

• Launched: October 2006
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Louisville, KY
• Founded by: Shawn Morton
• Website: http://profilactic.com

Costs

• Free (ad supported)

Rating

• 4 out of 5 (great)