In the last post from the ‘Talking to Profy Users’ series I have described several ways you can browse users on Profy and search for people with relevant interests. So now that you have added a dozen of Profy bloggers to your network, what does this mean for you?

First of all, it is important to understand that your Profy “friend” is not necessary your real-life (or online) friend – when you add a person to your network, you automatically will receive updates from his or her blog. In your feed reader you will see the posts from your friends in a special ‘Friends’ Feeds’ folder (but you can move them to other folders as well, of course). Of course, it is not required to add a blogger to your network to be able to subscribe to his or her blog – you can simply use RSS feed of the blog to subscribe in the feed reader.

Keep in mind that when you add a user to your network, this user will be able to see you in his network – this is what the ‘Who Befriended Me’ folder is for. So if you do not want a user to see that you are subscribed to his or her blog, you should not add this user as your friend and you should also choose appropriate privacy settings in your profile – for example, you should choose ‘Only me’ for ‘Show feeds that I read to’.


If you do not want other users to be able to see your own friends on Profy, do not forget to choose ‘Only me’ for ‘Show my friends list to’.


But adding a user to your network means that you will not only be able to easier access the blog authored by this user, but you will also be able to easier access this user from your network. If you go to My Network -> People -> My Friends folder, you will see the list of all the people that you have added to your network.


From this folder you can easily access information about all your friends. If you hover cursor over the name of a user, you will be able to see a pop-up window with the available information about this user: avatar, online/offline status, birthday, location. It is also possible to use this pop-up window to remove the user from your network, view the user’s blog and list of friends and subscriptions, and start talking to the user via the internal private instant messaging system.


The same information can be accessed by clicking on a user’s name – this will show the user profile in expanded view. It is also possible to use the ‘Switch to expanded view’ link in the lower left part of the screen to scroll down the list of all your friends and see their information in one place – for example when you remember what a person’s avatar looks like but do not remember the name and want to contact this particular user.

The most important social features on Profy are related to reading blogs, obviously – for every user that has chosen to make his or her list of subscriptions available to other users, you will be able to browse through the blogs this user is subscribed to on Profy. The best thing is that you can not only browse the feeds – it is also possible to easily subscribe to the blogs from this list so that posts from these blogs are delivered to your Profy feed reader.


Another sweet thing that is intended to enhance your networking with other bloggers and readers on Profy, is the private messaging system. For any user from any place of the system you can send a private message by clicking the ‘Open Dialogue’ link – this will start a dialogue between you where you will be able to exchange messages. You can access your latest messages via the ‘Inbox’ section and from the dashboard – for this you have the ‘Latest Messages’ widget. When you receive private messages, you will see the number of new messages near the ‘Inbox’ link everywhere on Profy.

And more social features are in the works already for you to be able to communicate easier and in a more comprehensive manner with other Profy users. So stay tuned for enhanced social networking on Profy.