Review: Profilactic, the FriendFeed Killer

July 5, 2008

Freelance writers in the new media need to understand web presence and use it to their advantage in order to be successful. There is a gold mine out there to be reaped, if only you know how, and one of the goals of this blog is to show you how to reap that gold mine for all you can.

I have talked before about web presence. This is the concept of a distributed form of identity that people have on the web. We make profiles, use social bookmarks, tag things, blog, and microblog. All of these are touchpoints for web presence, and the more consistent, plentiful, and accurate our touchpoints, the more of a web presence we have. Web presence is good, because it allows us to have more possibilities for interaction. Interaction is key, because it allows us to have the opportunity to share our services and knowledge with others. Whether it is music with Last.fm or news with Digg.com, we share, connect, and redistribute in a way that allows for gain for everyone.

For writers, ideas are our stock and trade, and thus the new media is a dream come true. We have the opportunity to not only reap incredible rewards from our little talent, but to take part in the dawn of a new world. Mark my words: everything is changing (again), and those who don’t change with it will go the way of the dinosaurs.

An important tool for the writer in the new media is lifestreams. They allow for all of our touchpoints of web presence to come together to present a picture of who we are, what we do, and why we do it. What we want is a dense and transparent web presence, because that is what maximizes out opportunities for both financial and personal gain.

For a while now I have been using FriendFeed as a lifestreaming service. It was the best around, and like many users I was willing to love hating it. It took forever to update, would cache a service’s feed for hours or sometimes days only to show something old and out of context. More than anything, it failed to be what I want out of a lifestream: transparent and dense.

Now I am using a new service, and I have to say that unless something better comes out, this is the FriendFeed killer. The new service is called Profilactic, and I am in love.

FriendFeed has 41 services:
$FriendFeed\'s paltry 41 services.$

Profilactic has a few more.

$Profilactic\'s wopping 186 services!$

Of course, more is not always better. Profilactic aggregates all these services, plus just about anything you can get an RSS or Atom feed from, and it aggregates your friend’s feeds into your’s as well…this is normal, and FriendFeed does that, as well as many others. What is different is the ability to filter your feeds and your friend’s feeds by service, which is something that people have been wanting from FriendFeed for a long time. In addition to that, it actually updates. It updates often, continuously, and quickly. There is a bit of lag from time to time, but that lag is the fault of the service they are streaming from, not them. Updates are not truly real-time, of course…we aren’t quite there yet. But they are fast, reliable, and don’t lose services for hours and days at a time, only to stream them as if they just happened.

The clincher is that these guys are in bed with Ping.fm and thus perfect for those of us who are working towards a dense and transparent web presence. Microblogging is one of the best ways to fill out the gaps in your presence. Between Profilactic’s lifestream and Ping.fm’s cross-posting microblogging, is there any reason at all to still use FriendFeed?

If anyone out there needs a Ping.fm beta key, give me a tweet, plurk, pownce, or tumble and let me know.