Today is a very big day for the entire Profy team as we are launching Profy beta at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. So first of all I would like to thank all our alpha users for their valuable feedback and for helping us bring Profy to the next level. We know perfectly well that we are not building Profy for ourselves – it is your blogging platform and your opinion and your wishes matter the most here so we are still looking forward to hearing from you to know where we should take Profy in its further development.

You might want to know what changes we have introduced today? So first of all we have focused on improving and stabilizing the current functionality. We have fixed all the bugs our alpha users helped us find and improved the platform’s performance in general so it works faster and more reliably now.

And, obviously, there are some new features added as well:

Crossposting:

You can now use your Profy blog to manage your blogs even if they are not based on Profy – we have made it possible for you to crosspost your Profy posts to your blogs on Blogger and Livejournal. Sure enough, more platforms coming soon so stay tuned as we are working hard to make Profy your real one-stop platform for blogging.

Tagging people:

Even in alpha you could use tags to identify posts in your own blog and in your feed reader. Now we take tagging on Profy to the new level – you can tag your friends on Profy to organize them and to make it easier for yourself to find people when you want to contact them privately, for example.

Modifications to the top panel on your blogs:

We have modified a lot the top panel you see when you view your own blog or blogs by other users. Now it is possible to report spam blogs or blogs with otherwise inappropriate content. You can also login easier to your own dashboard using this top panel and new users can create their own blogs when they like what they find on your blog, for example.

Subscription to blogs written by your friends:

We have changed the process of subscribing to blogs created by your Profy friends – you will now be able to choose if you actually want to read your friend’s blog.

Invitations:

While we have significantly reduced waiting time for invitations approvals (in fact, we have enabled them to be approved automatically unless the servers experience the load they can’t cope with), we decided that we were not perfectly ready for open registration yet (we simply did not want our current users to experience downtime while the new bloggers arrive). But all the current and new users receive 5 invitations to invite their friends to Profy by email so if you want to share your Profy experience with your friends, feel free to do so now – your friends will be let in immediately and they won’t have to wait for their invites to be approved.

So again, thank you for being with us from the very beginning, we will be looking forward to hearing your feedback. Happy blogging

San Francisco, CA, April 23, 2008 – At Web 2.0 Expo today, Profy is announcing the beta launch of its new Web platform for bloggers. Profy’s integrated solution supports a full range of advanced AJAX blogging applications to satisfy the most demanding and experienced bloggers yet features a simple user interface that novices will find immediately accessible.

The Profy platform underwent closed alpha testing in the first quarter of 2008. During this phase, it received positive reviews from prominent bloggers. Techcrunch’s Eric Schonfeld pronounced it a “social blogging platform” and “a natural evolution” of blogging. Profy has paid very close attention to the feedback from its alpha users and in the new beta version responds with performance improvements and important new functionality incorporating their suggestions.

Profy’s vision is to provide a single point of comprehensive seamless access and friendly navigation for the various stages of the blogging process – news reading, writing and publishing posts, discussing posts with readers, and otherwise communicating with readers and other bloggers. In short, Profy aims to provide – in one place – all the creative tools a blogger could want.

Profy’s platform is differentiated by its attention to the social aspects of blogging. It provides bloggers with tools to easily find people with common interests, communicate with them publicly and privately, and discover from them new sources of information. The combination of these features makes for a more “social” blogging experience, and virtually eliminates the possibility that bloggers will feel lonely because no one can find their creations easily.

Profy has chosen to announce its beta launch at the industry’s most influential event – Web 2.0 Expo, taking place in San Francisco at Moscone West April 22-25, 2008. To see first-hand how the Profy platform really differs from conventional blogging applications, visit the Profy team at Booth 940.

“We firmly believe that developers shouldn’t build web products for themselves but should build them for users,” says Profy CEO Ilya Korsun. “This is why we invite all bloggers to try out our platform, share their opinions with us, and tell us what functionality would really give them a better blogging experience. For our part, we will work hard to make the Profy platform the most blogger-friendly solution for all things blogging.”

About Profy, Inc.: Profy is a San Francisco-based company headed by Internet entrepreneur Ilya Korsun. The development team works out of Novosibirsk, Russia. The Profy platform has been in development since September 2006. The alpha version was launched in January 2008. For further information, visit http://www.profy.com.

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MEDIA CONTACT:
Svetlana Gladkova
Vice President, Business Development, Profy
Phone:     +1 415 830 6309
Email:        s.gladkova@profy.com

If you follow the main Profy blog, you may have noticed that nice banner in the sidebar announcing Profy participation in the Web 2.0 Expo that will take place in San Francisco on April 22-25. For us this is not some ordinary event – this is the first time the Profy blogging platform will be publicly announced at a major industry event.

This means that we are also going to make a big announcement at the conference – Profy beta will be launched with tons of improvements and interesting new features suggested by our early alpha users.

To get ready for the event and for the attention that we hope to receive for the new Profy blogging platform there, we need to do some preparation in advance and it involves reconfiguring our servers to support better performance of the platform itself. Unfortunately, it also results in the necessity to take the Profy alpha down on Thursday morning and keep it down until Profy beta is officially launched.

So if you are among our alpha users, I have to ask for your understanding of the fact that the platform will be unavailable for the nearest couple of weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience but I hope your patience will be compensated for when you see what we are getting ready to launch. If you are new and want to be able to start blogging on Profy when the platform is launched in beta, you will still be able to request to be notified when we are ready to let you in. Remember, our major principle is that it is the end user to decide what the ideal blogging process should look like – so we will be happy to have you with us and to hear what you have to say about how you want to blog.

And since I started with the importance of the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco for us, I would like to invite everyone to visit our team in our booth at the event (booth 940, it should be easy to spot as it is located right near the Long Tail Pavilion). So if you are planning to be at the Web 2.0 Expo and have a moment, stop by to say hello as we will be very happy to see all our early users and Profy readers there. If you are planning to participate at the event but have not registered yet, you have a chance to pay less or even get to the expo floor free of charge. If you register using a special Profy code websf08co46, you will receive $100 discount off any conference registration fee. Remember, if you only want to visit the expo hall itself and do not plan to participate in the workshops and sessions, there is a $100 expo pass – and this one you can get absolutely for free with Profy using the same code. So here is another reason for you to visit the event – you can actually get to the expo hall and meet numerous internet professionals there absolutely for free! See you at the Web 2.0 Expo!