Here is what the user code-named i.l. (I know the name and the person but thought that maybe he would prefer to stay anonymous here?) had to say about Profy networking functionality:

I think it would be really interesting if I could find friends or browse people on profy.

Update: the friends search returns no results in FF/Win, but I do get results in IE 7.  The online flag sure seems to work, but I'm not sure if/how the text input works.  For example, searching for "m" in users returned a bunch of people with no m in their name (juan) and no m in their profile.  Will keep looking.

First the report on searching for just something (like the letter “m” in the example): the thing is that when you do not use advance search on Profy, the engine will search for all the fields in profiles of all the users (including their interests, for example) – so chances are you will invariably get at least a few result to your request. If you use something more complex, you may not find anything at all if you do not know what you are looking for.

As for the general idea of looking for friends on Profy, here is what I can offer:

First of all, you can always see who is online at any given moment of time. For that you can go to ‘My Network’ section and in the ‘People’ folder (this combination is the default one so if you have just arrived you do not need to click anything else) apply filter ‘online only’ from the ‘Online status’ drop-down menu:

This will show you all the online users on Profy.

If you do not apply the filter (or search words), this will show you the list of the latest registered Profy users. If you type anything in the ‘Enter search word’ field, you will get search results (that you will also be able to see for users that are currently online/offline or all users by choosing the appropriate option from the drop-down menu above.

Another option to search for people you may want to connect with on Profy, is to use Advanced search (available by clicking the link of the same name to the right from the ‘Search’ button. Clicking this button will open the ‘Advanced Search’ window for you where you will be able to choose what exactly you are looking for.

For example, you can look for something in the full name of the person you want to find on Profy (say, you want to find all the users named “Svetlana” here). Or you can look for the users from a certain country with their name not containing “John”.

It is also possible to simply browse all the users from some country or a specific town – if you want to connect to bloggers based on their geographic location.

It is also possible to search for users of a specific age and older (or younger) a specific age.

You can also use avatars as a search criterion – there is a check field you can use to see all the users that have uploaded an avatar to their profiles.

And, finally, you can choose to search for specific interests in the users’ profiles if you want to connect with like-minded people, for example.

And there is another way to find new people on Profy as well. If you already have some friends on Profy, you can view their friends as well (provided your friends did not choose to keep their friends’ lists private, of course) – chances are you will find some people you will want to connect with on Profy.

I hope I have managed to outline the approach to finding people you would be interested in connecting with on Profy. In the next post I will describe what your connections will mean on Profy and how you can benefit from having people in your network.