Social Blogging Platform Profy Launches in Alpha
Erick Schonfeld
29 comments »
Today, we get a new blogging platform from Russian/San Francisco startup Profy. Does the world need another blogging platform? Maybe not. But, hey, give the Russians a chance. The more competition, the better. If you want to try it out yourself, we have 100 invites available here (enter “Techcrunch” in the description field). Update: Due to popular demand among TechCrrunh readers, Profy is opening up another 500 invite spots. Try not to crash their server folks.
Profy combines a WYSIWYG text editor with a feed reader and a social network of sorts. A dashboard on the start page shows your latest posts, feed items, comments on your blog, and messages. You can read your blog feeds, write posts, and find out what other Profy bloggers and commenters are reading in their feed readers (if they choose to make that public). There are all sorts of templates and layouts you can choose for your blog. (Check out this one I just set up). People on Profy are searchable as well. You can send them private messages and IMs. (See screen shots below).
It is this social aspect that could help to distinguish Profy, if enough people bother to sign up. Right now, blogs are already social in that any reader can leave a comment on a post. But imagine if you could search for any blogger or commenter and send that person a private message, or check out that persons public feed to see what they are reading. It seems like a natural evolution, bringing the worlds of blogging and social networking closer together.
That said, Profy still has a long way to go. Right now, it is pretty much a closed system. The company has plans to integrate its platform with more popular blogging services so that you will be able to live and write in Profy and then export your posts to Wordpress or Blogger or Typepad. It would do well to open up its commenting and messaging systems to other social networks as well, to give people an easy on-ramp onto the service.
Here is a slide show that goes through all of Profy’s features:
Click on these screen shots for full-page views:
interesting commentary on the social aspect. here’s my review from earlier today:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....r-platform
I read the blog from time to time and had no idea Svetlana was up to this. Good luck!
If I look at the screenshots it appears to me that their main goal is to be acquired by Google.
Not Bad.. I like the social aspects
They would not acquire mass-adoption if they did not make their source code open. That’s the only way to pique developer’s interests and to fuel plug-ins proliferation. Without which I do not see why folks would choose Profy over WordPress.
P.S. their efforts on RSS ceratinly is a step ahead in the Blogging world.
I thought no one else was developing blog apps anymore. Good to find out otherwise. The more, the merrier. I mean, why should WordPress have all the fun?
About my blog app, Collablog [collab'log]: if you are interested in starting your own blog portal or blog community, check out what Collablog has to offer.
http://www.collablog.com/
Google style……
does anyone else besides me think it’s pretty funny that they’re calling a public release an “alpha”? perhaps someone in pr thought calling something “alpha” was more dominant than “beta.”
It’s great to see continued innovation in the blogging and social networking fields and how they will be integrated. It makes my job easier finding more niche markets.
Thanks,
Kelly
I don’t think this is a good move for Profy. To suddenly switch from a blog to a blogging platform shows that they’re willing to switch business models on a whim. I wonder if they’ll make Profy.com a Second World competitor next.
I think they must be hoping that the social aspect of their platform will get people signing up with them.
All in all I don’t think its a bad idea because at this stage somebody has to come with something different otherwise people will stick to established blogging platforms.
Very good luck to another Russian start-up!
Im an avid Techcrunch reader, and never commented before and this sounds cheesily familar…i know.
but….
If it just WAS original…..blogsource was offering the same ’social’ aspect (and admittedly no free creatable skins and completely walled in all data) before they sold it to lifejournal who killed it, friends did tongtong.com, local Beijing site with the same goal and a local focus and some innovative features a lot of AJAX and never quite reached release maturity (but was open anyways), it died 10 months ago (meaning its open, but abandoned “Resident Evil”-Style), im not sure but I think all the features existed in this bundle before in many incarnations, which would leave exactly one thing they do better than before:
PR?
Until they open up everything, its just an old story done again with very small fringe innovations….nothing to write on this great page about….was it the tickets?
Looking good but who will exactly use them?
Seems blogging is coming very close to social networking,
This seems pretty interesting, I hope I get an invite so I can dive further into it.
Кокое всё красивое, кокое всё зилёнае!
:S It looks very ugly, and web 2.0 glosswhorey..
Well, at least their logo looks like Dan Cederholms stuff.
First of all I wanted to thank all the people that wish us luck here. As a startup we certainly need luck but we are already lucky to get attention from the blogosphere.
I would also like to reply to some of the comments.
First of all: No, we do not want to be acquired by Google, thank you.
It is obvious that we have a long way to go from this alpha stage to the mass adoption stage. We have lots of features and ideas to implement. In fact, the current functionality is about 20% of our roadmap so it is clear that we will add lots of things. I would like to emphasize that Profy represents a platform actually with separate applications and we will definitely let the developers to create their own applications/plug-ins – without it no blogging platform could survive, that is what we are certain about.
Our aim is to eventually make this platform something that will create maximum possible value for any blogger. This is one of the reasons why we are launching at this early stage to enable all the early users have their say about what they want the final product to be. And definitely we will work with various existing solutions to integrate them into the platform so that people could continue to use what they are accustomed to use.
I would also like to thank all the Techcrunch readers that have requested invitations to Profy. I am approving them constantly (monitoring the state of our servers on ServePath not to crush them with your attention). You are all welcome and we will be looking forward to seeing you all on Profy.
I like the name but how is this different than LiveJournal? Still, if it fails you can make money by selling the name.
Livejournal has been doing this for half a decade! Of course, livejournal has started to suck more and more recently, and their feedreader was never any good if you were heavily into rss. It’s interesting that livejournal was recently bought by a russian company.
Go go Svetlana!
“the current functionality is about 20% of our roadmap so it is clear that we will add lots of things.” - first look is quite promising. but don’t add too much please.
Well, we are listening to our initial users a lot and we sure will not add what people do not need. But some features people are accustomed to are missing from the current version - so we obviously will need to add lots of things. After all, Profy is not perfect - you yourself think the platform is promising