This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

When I first heard about Profilactic, I couldn’t resist checking out the lifestreaming service with the awful name. Many people agree that the name sucks, though the founders says that it gets its name because it aggregates your profiles. In other words, it is a ‘digital life aggregator’ which collects your social media activities in one handy place. This is called lifestreaming, and Profilactic is one of several tools available to do it.

Getting Started With Profilactic

Signing up for Profilactic takes less than a minute to enter your email address, desired username and password. Confirm your membership and you’re ready to start lifestreaming. To do this, add the sites you use to your profile. At the moment, Profilactic supports 186 of these, which probably makes it the widest ranging lifestreaming tool. It also supports RSS, so you can add feeds for services that are not overtly supported.

Lifestreaming Tools

Go to My Tools in the top menu and you can start or edit your lifestream. I added several sites, plus the links to my blogs, clicked on Finished and it built my lifestream. You can customize your lifestream by adding services, but choosing not to share updates. (Examples are Friendfeed and SecondBrain, which replicate many of the same features. Although I want people to find me there, adding them to my Profilactic lifestream would make it too cluttered.)

Other Tools

Like other social sites, you can fill out an extended profile which includes your location, birthday and interests. Also in tools is the ability to add content directly to Profilactic in much the same way as to Digg, BloggingZoom or similar sites. There’s a bookmarklet to go with it too. Another tool is the ability to create a lifestream from your friends’ activities on the sites you belong to, which could be a good way to keep track of what they are doing. Finally, there’s a Wordpress plugin which makes it easy to integrate your lifestream into your blog.

Likes And Niggles

Sometimes Profilactic has trouble retrieving one of the feeds. When this happens, you get a message above the lifestream. Sometimes it will even tell you which one. 

Once you’ve built your lifestream you can search it, you can see how many items there are on each site, and even get an average of how many items you post per week. For statsaholics like me, this is interesting.  

Another excellent feature is integration with Ping.fm, which means that you can post updates to all the services that accept them from within Profilactic. You can even reply to tweets from the Profilactic page, though I haven’t tested this.

My Verdict

So far, I like this tool. It has a nice clean interface and is easy to use. I’ve had some problems with some of the feeds, but that is often easy to fix by choosing a different source feed. I don’t use the updating service much (mostly because I’m too busy playing with Plurk) but I think this lifestreaming tool is one to watch. Check out my lifestream here to see how yours could look.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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