Profilactic, the digital life aggregator, reviewed
I love the idea of aggregation. With so many new services around, I want to have a central hub from which I can control or at least supervise them all. Profilactic is an online profile aggregator, which means it combines content that you take from or contribute to various online services, like 43 Things, del.icio.us, Digg, Newsvine, YouTube, Bebo, MySpace, and many other (all in all, 31) services. If you use a service that’s not on a list, you can add it by adding its URL or RSS feed URL.
Such a site must have a very clean and simple interface to work, and Profilactic definitely delivers in this department. Creating a profile and adding profiles from other services you use is as easy as can be.
Unfortunately, this simplicity backfires somewhat. After creating a profile, a mashup is built for you, which is a simple long list of your activity on various services, divided by days. And that’s it. There’s no way to change the view, for example see your activity by hours or weeks; no way to make the font smaller to have a better view…basically, the organizational possibilities are zero. You can filter activity from various services, and you can use the RSS feed which is generated from all your activity. And while this RSS feed can be used in other services, which makes for some interesting possibilities (for example, I’ve set up a Netvibes box with all my activity right away), it’s a pity there aren’t more options.
As far as other options go, you can create a profile, have friends, check your friends’ mashups, or put a simple bookmarklet on your browser’s toolbar for easy addition of new content. Although Profilactic is still in beta, I haven’t encountered bugs with any of these, it all works fast and very well. Another thing that Profilactic can do is collect clippings, which are basically tagged bookmarks. The feature is nice, but not necessary; after all, Profilactic is about aggregating stuff which includes bookmarks on various online bookmarking services. Finally, there’s a neat option called Profilactic badge, which enables you to include your mashup on a website.
Profilactic has a good foundation to build on. It got the important part right, now it needs to add some advanced options, because an RSS feed and a simple list won’t cut it. Aggregation is also about organization, and a service like this must have a myriad of ways to present content, otherwise many users will be disappointed with the lack of options. I hope that in the future it will do more to satisfy the power users. This, of course, doesn’t mean the service is useless now; it’s a great, simple way to mash all of your online stuff into an RSS feed.
January 24th, 2007 at 5:17 am
Thanks for the review. I am glad you are enjoying Profilactic so far. I think your critique is right on the mark. As you mention, we still have a way to go in getting all of the power user features in place. Those are coming.
Just to clarify - the idea behind clippings is to give you a place to just bookmark stuff just about you. Soon, you’ll be able to import an RSS feed from an outside bookmarking service. For example, I keep stuff about me on del.icio.us tagged “smorty71.” So I could import that tag’s RSS feed into clippings.
Again, thanks for the review and stay tuned for more features over the next few weeks.
sm
January 25th, 2007 at 6:46 am
@smorty71: thx for the clarification. I’ll continue to watch the development of Profilactic, and I wish you the best of luck with it.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:59 am
[…] Loopster is a social networking profile aggregator, similar to a degree to Profilactic which we wrote about earlier. The site has unfortunately suffered the TechCrunch effect and is currently down. […]
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[…] with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as […]
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