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.

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.
 

I have been offered a very simple solution on how the My Network section could be made much more user-friendly.

Quoting Deborah Workman:

It seems that this would work better if instead of Friends/Who befriended you tabs, there was just one screen of friends with an icon or word that showed “Befriended by” status perhaps by displaying the username in that column, which perhaps could be sortable by clicking on the header. I suggest that the view toggles be placed at the top of the screen (either only or additionally) so that the user does not have to scroll to the bottom of a long list to choose this option.

So I thought about doing it Netscape or StumbleUpon style maybe to make this more visible. Any ideas from other testers on how you would want to work with your friends within Profy?