Over the last week I’ve been trying hard to understand how exactly Wikipedia works in terms of having an entry for your company there. What is absolutely clear from the community guidelines is that you are not supposed to create or edit an entry for yourself or your company. But it is obvious that by sitting and waiting for someone to write a special entry about your entry you will hardly ever get one!

So I decided that I would publish a small post here inviting all the Profy bloggers to participate in creating a page for Profy on Wikipedia (this is the initial link that takes you to writing a new page named “Profy”). After all, if you like the platform, chances are some other people will be happy to discover Profy through one of the relevant Wikipedia pages and more people will be blogging here. And we all know that Profy is definitely more fun with more bloggers here.

So if you feel like giving Profy some help on Wikipedia, feel free to use the materials in our About page as sources. And obviously, I will be happy to provide any additional information on the Profy platform should you need any. I will appreciate any help from our users we could get for Profy so thank you in advance!

I have read a post by Ronald De Leon in which he described his initial Profy experience with a great humor. And since he was talking to himself in the post, I decided I should join and turn this into some kind of a conversation:

When typing in the WYSIWYG editor then switching to code view, via the HTML button, it is very messy.  There are no line breaks

Why don't you just type in code then???

Uhh, because the WYSIWYG is set to default and a button is, usually, faster than typing in <pwqijefpoeijf>whatever</pwqijefpoeijf>

 
Surely, we never expect people to use code view by default. After all, even if you are the best HTML expert ever, clicking a button is definitely easier than typing lengthy lines of code.

You are absolutely right about the line breaks in the code view – but this is true for many other blogging platforms. So when I edit posts in Wordpress and I need to use code view, I first find the line breaks and separate them and only then I do the editing I need.  Of course, I do not suggest you doing the same – certainly, writing in WYSIWYG is a better option and I will have our guys see if it is possible to make the code view less messy for you and other users facing similar problem.

Leaving the site while writing a new post by accidentally pressing the back/forward/bookmark/home/any button key completely gets rid of post.

Why don't you just Save as draft

Well, you see (presses Save as draft)... it takes you OUT of the post.  And don't even tell me about the Save button... a.k.a. PUBLISH.

I am not a developer myself but as far as I know these back and forward buttons are the most difficult problem for AJAX applications. You can see that whenever you are on Profy (except when viewing your own blog or blogs by other users) the URL in your browser address bar never changes (it is constantly http://alpha.profy.com). So whenever you do something with your browser buttons, you will be taken away from the product completely – which is bad but can not be fixed with the existing technologies.

I will definitely see to it that we have automatic saving on our roadmap for the future releases. But there is one thing about the writing process that you may not have noticed but that may be a nice surprise for you. You may have noticed that when you start writing a new post a new tab is opened (it is named ‘Write’) and unless you close the Profy tab completely you can do whatever you want inside the product and your post will stay intact in this tab. For example, you can go and browse some of your other posts or you can even go to feed reader or answer some new comments – the post you are editing will remain as it is. So saving your posts as drafts is only necessary if you want to close the browser tab or window or log out of the product – otherwise you can resume editing from where you leave it any time you want. I hope this can sugar-coat a bitter truth for you a little!

Yesterday I realized that I had absolutely forgotten to update the special Profy group on Facebook – I was too busy after the alpha launch, I think.

So I have finally got to updating it – added some screenshots and useful links to the initial reviews of the Profy blogging platform. So I would like to invite all my readers and each and every early Profy user to join the Profy group on Facebook and use it as a place for any discussions related to your testing experience.

Also I could not avoid building a special product page for Profy on Facebook – I think it is the hottest trend on Facebook now and I bump into pages of my friends’ websites everywhere on Facebook. So if you like the trend and want to show your connection to Profy during this early stage, I invite you to become a fan of Profy on Facebook and share this page with your friends you think might be interested in the Profy blogging platform.

And if you are willing to connect to me personally on Facebook, feel free to add me to your network – I am the admin of both the page and the group – and I love connecting to new people sharing my interests.

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 Samantha Sun had to suggest to us:

One feature that I most like to see is the ability to ‘private’ a blog. Whether it’s a leveled type permission (show to friends only, show to me only, show to members only, public) or the ability to password the entire blog (or even individual posts!). Not sure if many would agree and want to see this feature (so here’s hoping). I know there’s a visibility feature – but right now it’s all or nothing – visible to public or not.

We here understand that privacy has become a very important issue for web services and we definitely will add lots of tools to help you maintain your privacy at the level that is convenient to you. In the future you will be able to limit who can see your entire blog or separate posts – your friends, your subscribers, all Profy users, anyone.

For the time being we have decided to focus on privacy features that are related to your reading and networking – in your profile you can choose who will see what you read and who will see your friends.

There are several levels of privacy now:

 

• Anyone – in this case anyone will be able to see your friends and feeds you read via the widgets on your blog (currently we do not have a widget for the feeds you read, you can only show blogs from your friends)
• Subscribers – all the Profy users
• Friends – people you have added to your network as friends
• Only me – no one will be able to see the information but yourself

If privacy is important to you and you do not want to share your reading lists and your friends lists with the world, do not forget to choose the appropriate settings in the profile.

I will be looking forward to seeing further feedback from users to publish in this ‘Talking to Profy Users’ series. 

I was thinking a lot about how I could keep all the initial users updated on what we are doing here and how to answer as many questions as possible. And I decided that using my own blog on Profy for this is a good idea to answer questions because I guess that many users have similar questions and thus will be interested in the same issues. So I am starting the series “Talking to Profy users” with answers to the first feedback I received from Justin Flowers, Interactive Marketing Specialist at Resercom.

So here is what he had to say about the newly released in alpha Profy blogging platform (lots of useful things if you want to know my opinion) and what I can reply to him and everyone interested:

Here's my feedback on Profy.

Reader -
The reader is the first thing I looked at. It looks like it has a lot of potential. The first thing I noticed is that the expanded view, at the bottom of the reader, is hard to spot. The second thing I noted was that there are no keyboard shortcuts, and because I'm used to Google Reader's "J," "K" and spacebar shortcuts your reader felt a bit cumbersome.

 Overall, the reader looks nice and the expanded view works really well, even the location of the expanded/list view link can be gotten past once it's spotted, but it's crucial for someone like me, with well over one hundred feeds, to be able to use keyboard shortcuts.

 
I can agree 100% that for a power user being able to use keyboard shortcuts is something we are really used to and we definitely have this on the roadmap. It has proven to be more difficult to implement than we expected so we decided to launch alpha without the shortcuts but we will add this ASAP.

Right now we decided to offer some more advanced features to sorting items in your feeds – for example, reading the posts from a certain period of time only.

As for the location of the expanded view link, putting the link in the header seemed to make the reader look rather crowded so we have decided to put it where it is and see if users will manage to change their habits. After all, we have a tabbed interface already and adding an extra tab (Google Reader style) definitely is not right.

Blogging -
The blogging platform is fairly easy to work through. The tabs are all very understandable and easy to navigate. The write tab makes sense, and I like the ability to switch between the WYSIWYG editor and the plain HTML editor. I really like the ability to easily import YouTube videos with the push of a button and the image button is also pretty straight forward. The only problem I foresee with the way it is now, is that there doesn't seem to be anywhere to locally store images.

Yes, we have tried to make the tabs as understandable as possible. I guess the best idea is that the ‘Write’ tab permits you to navigate to other tabs (to answer comments, search for the posts you want to link to and configure settings) without having to save the post – when you return to the ‘Write’ tab you will find the post exactly how you left it and can resume editing.

We have also tried to make use of your own multimedia content as easy as possible. We understand that the ability to upload your own images is important to some users but at this early stage we can not afford to offer storage space to all the users. We will eventually add upload and storage of multimedia content but chances are it will be a paid-for option.

The dashboard is very useful and an easy way to spot anything that has changed (feeds, comments, etc).

Yes, this is the main idea behind Profy – you can do everything within only one browser tab never having to move to another application. And on the dashboard you will be able to see all the changes and go directly to the sections that require your attention (reply to the new comments or messages in the inbox, for example).

Overall, this isn't the type of platform that I would generally use, but I say that mostly because I think the blogging platform is too elementary for my needs. I love the idea of combining the reader and the blog - it seems to make perfect sense.

I think I should mention here that we have only coded about 20% of the roadmap so the platform will become more sophisticated. Right now we understand that it appeals mostly to the beginners but eventually we promise that even the power users will be happy with the functionality. This is why we are so happy about your feedback – we need to know what parts of the roadmap we should focus on.

Here's what would make me use this service:

A stronger blogging platform with more options and the ability to create my own templates and edit them etc.

Storage (images, etc)

Keyboard shortcuts, for the reader primarily, but also they would probably be useful everywhere.
Integration with other services.  I know this is a stretch and probably not something that you're in a position to work on - but, if I combined my blog and reader and a somewhat limited social network I would want to be able to combine everything else there as well. (Facebook notifications, my email, etc)

Yes, we realize that we have a long way to go to suit everyone’s needs here but this is what we are going to do. And while some of the features only depend on us, integration is the key to success as we see it. This is why as soon as the platform is ready, we will focus on integrating lots of services here for your Profy dashboard to actually become your one and only dashboard for the web.

I think you have a solid product idea with Profy, and I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future.

Thank you for the kind words and for the valuable feedback, I promise we will not disappoint you with our future development.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Profy Announces Alpha Launch of Its One-Stop Web Platform for All Things Blogging

San Francisco, CA, January 9, 2008 -- With blogging clearly here to stay and experts predicting continuing growth, Profy enters the game today with the alpha launch of its new Web platform for bloggers. The integrated solution supports a full range of advanced AJAX blogging applications to satisfy the most demanding and experienced bloggers yet features a simple user interface that novices will find immediately accessible.

Profy’s vision is to provide single, comprehensive seamless access and friendly navigation for the many stages of the blogging process – news reading, sharing selected news stories with a group of readers, writing posts and publishing them, discussing posts with readers, and communicating with readers on other topics. In short, it wants to provide -- in one place -- all the creative tools a blogger could want. Notable among the capabilities are an integrated dashboard with full-featured reader making it easy for bloggers to follow important events, an advanced WYSIWYG editor that turns the publishing process into a snap, and social networking tools that allow authors to engage in discussions with readers.

Today’s launch kicks off private alpha testing of the platform with an initial set of tools and applications allowing users to read and write blogs, discuss created content, and network socially with readers and other bloggers.

“Through this launch, Profy is creating the opportunity for initial users to influence how the final platform will look and perform,” said Ilya Korsun, CEO. “Profy developers will work in close cooperation with users to ensure that when the platform emerges from beta it will provide bloggers of all kinds with whatever they need.”

Bloggers interested in joining the alpha testing program can request an invitation at http://alpha.profy.com/getinvite.

About Profy, Inc.: Profy is a San Francisco-based company headed by veteran Internet entrepreneur Ilya Korsun. The development team works out of Novosibirsk, Russia. The Profy alpha platform has been in development since September 2006. For further information, visit http://www.profy.com.

Dear alpha testers and initial users, I am very excited to announce that we are finally launching the Profy alpha today and showing it to a number of major bloggers. I have already sent our press release to a number of publications and will publish it here when the embargo is lifted at noon (EST) today, January 9.

You will see some major updates, lots of new features added and a ton of bugs fixed. The most significant changes are in the 'My Network' section. The most important thing is that we have added a private messaging system so that any user can talk directly to any other user of Profy. You can also view a user's Online/Offline status throughtout the platform. We have also implemented important changes in how the blog search works - for example, you can now subscribe to the blog right from within the search results. For the RSS feeds you are subscribed to you will be able to see the lists of subscribers - provided that it is allowed by the privacy settings of other users.

And certainly we have had lots of bugs fixed and it finally permits us to start inviting more people in. But anyway, I would like everyone to remember this is an alpha release and we have lots of things to do ahead. And I invite all of you to let us know what things you need to work otherwise, what features you think should be added and which way we should steer the development in the future. Your feedback is extremely important to us and our team needs all your opinions and suggestions to eventually make the Profy platform the product any blogger would be absolutely happy with.

And wish us all luck, we are going to face publicity finally! This is a very important day for us and I would like to thank our team of initial testers for being with us and for helping us get where we are today. I do appreciate everything you do for Profy and I hope you will stay with us throughout the alpha-beta-out of beta stages as you are the best team of testers any startup could dream of having!

Dear testers,

We have finally uploaded a new release of the product that includes a number of bug fixes and the results of our long-time optimization efforts. Besides, we have finally moved the product to ServePath which should also improve the general speed problems. So these results are finally here for all of you to test and I will really appreciate you taking a moment to follow these steps:

1. Logout from the product
2. Clear cache in your browser
3. Login again using Firebug or some stop watch to measure the time it takes for the dashboard to load

I would love to get the results from you in the comments below, on your Profy blogs or by email - any way that suits you better.

As always, I appreciate your support and your involvement in helping us make Profy better and bring it to the state when it is ready to be shown to public.

This post is intended to report on the upgrade we have just performed on Profy. Below you will find the list of changes compared to the previous version:

• Blog search tool (powered by Sphere) - both for internal Profy blogs and external blogs
• Fixed quite a number of bugs in the feed reader and introduced styles for the posts shown in the feed reader
• Improved dashboard
• Fixed bug in the avatar upload process and avatar display in the profile (you will now have to experience it since as you might remember we have not managed to migrate the avatars of beta testers)
• Improved widgets for your blogs (introduced editing for the widgets)
• YouTube movies support for the blog posts

In general we have completed a number of code optimization tasks and thus improved the overall performance and load speed of the product.

As always, I will be looking forward to feedback from you for us to know where to move on.