CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
Profy Blogging Platform Moves Into Beta
We initially reviewed blogging platform Profy on their closed alpha launch in January. This week at the Web 2.0 Expo, Profy has moved into beta (though still private??). Louis Gray has an extensive review of the updates.
Profy sits in the middle between using Blogger and creating your own blog. There’s a powerful RSS reader, startpage and a variety of blogging tools to make the blogging process more advanced than what Blogger can offer. Since it was built by bloggers for bloggers, it should help to cure some of the pain points of using other blogging tools. The tough part will be on the marketing and user adoption side. Converting has very high switching costs, perhaps Profy needs to go after the new user market first and gain adoption there.
I asked founder Svetlana Gladkova about her experience at Web 2.0 Expo. She said, "Web 2.0 Expo is an awesome place to publicly announce a product and people constantly stop by our booth and ask what Profy is about and when we explain to them, they all get really excited and that’s what makes us absolutely happy. I can hardly write down all the suggestions for the platform people have made – they all have something in mind that could make their blogging even more flexible a process than we currently make it. Now the only thing we have to do is decide which of these suggestions to focus on – and then code them."
If you’d like an invite, leave a comment and I will work on getting some for ya’all – make sure you leave your proper email address is the email field.
Hey Allen! Thanks for the write-up. As for it being “private” it’s totally open. The invite request should auto-generate an invite. As we start scaling this up, the developers just wanted to keep a good handle on how many we were getting at a time, as well as make it a little bit more difficult for anyone who wanted to sign up for nefarious purposes. ;) I can get folks invites as well, so feel free to drop me a note if you have any problems with the invite request!
As for user adoption, one of the new things with the beta release is that we have the ability to push your blog posts out to Blogger and LiveJournal blogs, and will be adding more functionality as the developers build out the features. If you check out Louis Gray’s post on his blog, you can see that his post was actually pushed out from his use of the Profy platform by seeing it at http://louisgray.profy.com! I hope he didn’t mind, but I used his example as a demo so folks can see how seamless it is to move over when they are already using an existing publishing tool.
Jules, one of the nice things about the platform is that it has a very low entry point and easy-to-use interface for people who’ve never blogged before and may be intimidated by some of the products out there, but still has all the features folks like me are looking for, and I’ve used almost everything out there: JRoller, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress… come check us out and let the team know what you think!
In reference to your comment in January about Profy being for basic blogging. . . sounds like you have changed your mind!
Is that the case? If so, I’d be interested to see what they’ve been up to.
Not that my blog is exactly pro-lific at this stage ;-)