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