Profy has finally launched our very own blogging platform in alpha. We have been developing it here in Russia for more than a year now and the alpha release is a very important step. We were sitting and waiting nervously for the first reviews after the embargo was lifted and I think I will post links to some of the first reviews here to cordially thank all the bloggers.

Crenk was the first to break the story though I was a bit disappointed to see our press release almost unchanged. But you need to stick to using language from press releases when you want to break news and be the first.

Just a few minutes later the first actual review arrived from CenterNetworks. I knew Allen from CN took some time testing the product out so I was pretty worried about what his conclusions would be. But I felt instantly relieved after I read what Allen had to say because the review was much more favorable than I even dared to hope. And Allen was right on the spot about the current state of the product when he stated that at the moment the platform could be more interesting for basic bloggers as it lacks many features that experienced bloggers are accustomed to using. To reply to this, I think I should mention that the current state of the product only represents about 20% of the entire roadmap so eventually even the more experienced bloggers will find it meeting their requirements to a blogging platform.

A few hours later the review from Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch arrived which I was very happy about because getting rather a favorable review from the most powerful technology blog is definitely worth something for a startup. In fact, Eric was able to see the most important thing of the platform – that is, its “social” nature. He was even generous enough to tell

“It seems like a natural evolution, bringing the worlds of blogging and social networking closer together.”

This review was promoted to the front page of Digg and sent lots of people requesting invitations to try out Profy. Right now I am busy distributing the invitations to the people that arrived from Techcrunch, CenterNetworks, How To Split An Atom, and other blogs. If you have requested your invitation and have not received it yet, you will definitely get it in the next few days – we are not letting all the people in simultaneously because we have to watch how our servers behave not to crash everything.

A special thank you goes to all the bloggers that have already covered our launch in multiple languages that I just can not read – Chinese, Romanian, German, Italian and some other languages I could not even recognize. I don’t know if there reviews were positive or negative but anyway I am happy to see international users coming from these blogs and requesting invitations.

Finally, I would like to thank every blogger that took some time to try out our new product and to review it on his or her blog. I appreciate each and every post and we are watching closely all the comments from bloggers to know what things we should focus on in our future development. If you are a blogger and want to post a review of Profy on your own blog and distribute some invitations to your readers, shoot me an email at s.gladkova@profy.com and I will provide the instructions.

So thanks to every single blogger and user that helped us make this alpha release possible. We know perfectly well that we have a long way to go with the product but we will do our best to make Profy the perfect blogging platform that any blogger will be happy about.

UPDATE: We have also received a fabulous review from Webware. Josh Lowensohn definitely spent quite some time using and reviewing the platform and I have an impression that he has come to the conclusion that the hype around Profy is deserved.