Shawn Morton is the co-founder of Profilactic. Visit the company blog here.

Tell us about yourself. What is your personal background?

I actually went to graduate school to be a filmmaker; however, I got into web development in an effort to get my student films online (not an easy thing to do on dialup back in 1996). Once I saw the opportunities on the web, I focused on that full-time and my first "real" job was as a web designer.

I have been working on the web professionally for 10 years now. I've done everything from user interface design to information architecture to (my current day job) managing a product development team for a leading online media company.

I currently live in Louisville, Kentucky, as does the rest of the Profilactic team. I handle most of the front-end stuff for Profilactic (design, CSS, HTML) as well as the pimping of the service to friends, family, bloggers and anyone else who will pay attention.

What has occurred since the launch of Profilactic?

It has been pretty crazy since that first Folksonomy article about us landed on the digg home page. There are only 4 of us working on the site *and* all of us have day jobs and families, so our schedules have been pretty crazy over the past couple of months. It has really seemed like a blur at times.

We signed up over 500 people in the first week of our private beta (and eventually had to turn off new sign-ups for a while) and just about that many more since opening up the public beta on Monday. That more than exceeded our expectations. As a result, we've gotten a lot of great feedback about the overall idea as well as features people would like to see. This is all very cool considering we started the service for ourselves. We had no idea if other people would like it.

We've added a lot of new features since our initial private beta launch. My favorite is the Friends' mashup. It allows you to pull together all of the content that your friends post online into a single page.

What are some things you have learned through launching Profilactic?

Because we are doing this in our spare time, we have really learned how to focus on what matters and skip the stuff that doesn't. Our initial feature list was ridiculous and we quickly realized we would never get to it all. So we had to really learn to tune into our core functionality and strip out (or postpone) all of the nice-to-haves.

I think that, in addition to making our lives easier, this approach has made the service better. It is forcing us to keep things simple and clean.

This is very similar to the approach 37 Signals talks in their book "Getting Real" and, for us, it has turned out to be effective.

I think I've also learned how to better deal with criticism. As soon as you put something on the web, especially when it gets on digg, you have to be ready to deal with lots and lots of not-so-constructive criticism. I've found that if you address the criticism directly and without starting a huge flame war, you can often change people's minds... or, at least, diffuse the situation a bit. So far, we've been pretty lucky. Most comments have been positive.

How did you come up with the name?

After getting my thoughts together for the basic site idea, I knew that we would need a snazzy name. I wanted something clever like del.icio.us that still conveyed what the site was all about. So I grabbed a notepad and went to GoDaddy.

I spent a lot of time stuck on the idea of playing off of "I.D." Most of the names that I came up with were terrible. Not only were the names terrible, but the domains were already taken. Next, I began playing around with the word "profile." I dropped the "e" and began adding letters to the end. For some reason, without the "e," my brain kept thinking "prolific." After staring at "profil" and "prolific" for a while, I came up with "profilactic."

I immediately loved the name. It was related to the overall idea, it was kind of clever and I knew people would remember it. Plus, since I was using a bastardized spelling, the domain name was available. So I forked over $7.95 and bought the domain.

Since launching the beta, I've gotten a lot of interesting feedback on the name. Most people either love it or hate it. Ultimately, I think that is a good thing. After all, we're not trying to please everyone. I've jokingly said that the name is designed to weed out people who don't have a sense of humor. Hopefully, people can look past the name and give the service a try. That's the important thing after all.

What are your favorite blogs and Web 2.0 services?

Wow, that's a tough one. Some of my old standbys in terms of services are Flickr, digg, del.icio.us, etc. Nothing new there. I read a few Web 2.0 blogs like Folksonomy, Deep Jive Interests and Tech Crunch pretty regularly.

I am still obsessed with Vimeo (and have been for a while). So much better than YouTube for people who want to be interesting and creative with their videos.

One of the newer services that I really love right now is iLike. I really like how they are using data you are generating via iTunes and turning that into a cool experience on the web. In some ways, it is similar to our approach with Profilactic -- go do your normal online activities and we'll aggregate it and make it easier to consume.

I am also fascinated by twitter and wish that I could figure out why I should use it. I find myself posting really random and mundane things like "I am watching a football game." I think it's that I'm just not that interesting. I think the service is cool, though.