Profy - The casual all-in-one
I came across Profy today and it really impressed me. It claims to be an ‘all-in-one’ blogging platform, a haven for bloggers if you like, where a combination of blog posting, social networking and feed reading is combined into one easy-to-use platform. Having watched the demo, it certainly does look easy to use and this leads on from my previous post about who uses social bookmarking. My concerns of casual Internet users being able to use such features were founded on lack of purpose to uses them and lack of mass documentation describing what they are and how to use them.
The platform consists of four main areas:
- Simple blogging platform where you can choose from a variety of templates, modify the layout and add HTML/JavaScript
- Social bookmarking and sharing tags and favourites amongst other bloggers in the community
- A place for social networking - interacting with other user’s profiles including discussion boards and instant messaging
- An RSS feed reader platform which storing any number of RSS feeds from external sites
Ultimately, this is another example of a nice piece of user-friendly Web 2.0 software which can get pretty much anyone involved with social networking, blogging and sharing, all in one place. But how will people know about it, and will it ever have the power and publicity to overthrow giants like Blogger and Facebook. I wouldn’t be so confident. But as a Web 2.0 startup, it shows promising signs for a potentially large userbase and with the right promotion it could introduce these terrific Web 2.0 technologies to a generation of casual users.
