July 18th, 2007 Davis
I have to admit that the first time I heard about Profilactic, I was a bit skeptical. After all, I already belong to 50 different social networks, but only have time to interact with half of them. While I like checking out new sites, there are also a lot of things that I sign up for, but forget about later. I didn’t know it at the time, but having to manage so many different social networks, is actually what makes Profilactic so useful to begin with.
When Shawn Morton told me that the site was going to be a place where you could create a profile to show your friends, I thought he was crazy. I mean after all, just about every web 2.0 site has someplace for you to write a quick bio. In my case, I’ve even got a blog where people can find out all kinds of information about me. I couldn’t see a reason why I would need to create a profile on a web 2.0 site, just to showcase my other profiles.
What I didn’t understand about Smorty’s plan though, was that he wasn’t talking about a static profile in the traditional sense. The site is not about what you’ve done or accomplished, it’s about what you are doing now and who are today.
Before I saw Profilactic, I could only think of someone’s profile as a quick bio with some links. I never thought about a profile being multidimensional, but what Smorty built was a dynamic profile that could display all of your day to day social activity on one website.
While conceptually, I couldn’t understand the appeal, after seeing it in action, I now have a different appreciation for how powerful Profilactic’s tools really are. Everytime I Digg a story, it lets people know. When I upload a video to YouTube or fav a photo on Zooomr, I can include that in my feed. Whether you are a MySpace fan or a Facebook user, Profilactic can take your identities there and fuse it into a more cohesive picture of your interests. It’s like Digg Spy, only for all of your social networks.
For every story that I blog about, there are at least 10 that I miss. Everyday, I find great content, but don’t have the time to give it the attention it deserves. Sometimes I will comment, sometimes I’ll bookmark or Digg the site hoping to come back and write about it later. Sometimes, I just find strange tidbits that I’m not really sure where to file.
Normally, these stories would fall through the cracks, but Profilactic allows me to set up a feed, so that people who are interested, can see other parts of my online life. Not everybody will be interested in what I’m doing, but for those who care about what happens away from DavisFreeberg.com, you can now track the various sites and links that I come across online.
As a blogger, I’m probably more interested than the general population in expressing myself online, but I recognize that a lot of people would rather listen in the shadows than stand in the limelight. While I can appreciate being able to build a central profile to share with my friends, there are also a lot of people who have no interest in sharing information about themselves.
While on the surface, you wouldn’t think that Profilactic would appeal beyond the exhibitionist crowd, it’s ability to track other people’s social movement is actually very appealing to my voyeuristic side. The data feeds that you can create allow you access to information that would normally be impossible or pretty time consuming to get at. While I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing, if you want to cyberstalk someone, I know of few resources that offer more information about what someone is up to.
Intellectually, I know that nothing I do online is a secret, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how much information you really give up. Forget about needing someone’s social security number, with Profilactic, the user name is what’s most important. In an information age, this is both exciting and terrifying. On one hand, I could see this being very useful for keeping tabs on certain key people or even as a social network filter for certain topics or companies that I am interested in.
On another hand though, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be, if someone I didn’t get along with, was using it to track me. While I like having the ability to watch other people’s social activity, when it comes to actually being watched, I feel differently about it. It’s not fair to have a double standard, but it’s part of my human nature I guess.
Even though all of the data that Profilactic uses is public, I’m not sure that I’d want an ex-girlfriend to be able to watch all of my social activity or see that I had set up an account on HotorNot.com. People already freaked out when we saw tools introduced, that could notify you if your MySpace crushes became single. Profilactic can take this to a new level.
If you actually think about the amount of information that you give away online, it’s a little bit scary. If I upload a photo to Zooomr and geotag it, someone will know the date, time and location of where I was when I took the photo. If I bookmark a recipe, then it would be easy to guess about what I’m having for dinner and whether it’s taco night with the guys or a romantic dinner. While most of this information is pretty harmless, in the context of a bad relationship, it could be a little awkward.
It took me a while to reconcile the part of me that sees Profilactic as an excellent data mining tool with the part of me that is concerned about it being a not so good date mining tool. Eventually though, I realized that all of this information is already out there and that part of being in a social community, means that for better or worse, people get to see what you are doing.
If I’m not comfortable with Profilactic, than I shouldn’t be anymore comfortable with Digg, Del.icio.us or Pandora, but all of these sites are valuable resources and sometimes sharing what I’m doing is the best part. When you combine these various web 2.0 services with Profilactic’s ability to filter and aggregate this activity, you can get a much more comprehensive look at someone’s personality. If I have a problem with something showing up there, than I probably shouldn’t have dugg some drunk stripper orgy story to begin with.
At the end of the day, Profilactic’s technology may be a little unnerving, but only because it shatters the false illusion that you actually have privacy and anonymity to begin with. There is a saying that if you can’t beat them, join them and in this case, I’d rather take advantage of the social networks than to hide from them. If Profilactic can make finding and sorting this information easier, than I am a fan, even if I do end up embarrassing myself once in a while.
Posted in Technology, Search, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
I love the web 2.0 movement, but I still wince every time I hear a wacky web 2.0 name. I’m not sure how each website or company came up with their name, but it’s fair to say that today’s generation of entrepreneurs, did not get straight A’s in spelling during Elementary school. Whether it’s Joost, Pownce or Zooomr, when it comes to 2.0 names, you can pretty much throw spelling out the window.
After testing the technology, UPS spent $20 million to outfit their fleet. Even though a $20 million expense isn’t a major amount of money for a company the size of UPS, the introduction of the technology had a more important ripple effect, on the productivity of their drivers. Between the savings on the insurance premiums, the time saved by drivers and the reduction in accidents, I wouldn’t be surprised, if their investment has long since paid off.