Major Changes on Profy

Today I am extremely pleased to announce several major changes released by Profy. First, I’ll describe our essential new features. First of all, we have added two new sections to the website:

Companies Directory

This section includes information about various Web 2.0 companies. A profile of every company listed in the directory is quite extensive and includes general information about the company, such as its name, website URL (integrated with Snap Preview), description of activities, contacts. It also includes Alexa traffic details, logo and screenshots of the company’s product. The unique feature of the directory is that for each company profiles will display all the relevant posts on Profy blog and news submitted by Profy users to the brand-new Bookmarks section (see below). This will enable users to find as much information about a certain company as possible – and all in one place.

Companies will be added by registered users of Profy after moderation. So we invite owners and managers of Web 2.0 companies to register with Profy and submit your company to the directory for your potential customers to benefit from having all the information about it in one place. You are also welcome to add links to the news about your company to the Bookmarks section (tagging it with the name of your company) for these links to appear in your company’s profile. If you want your company to be listed in the directory but have some questions, you are welcome to contact me for a discussion.

Bookmarks

Here is the place for members of Profy community to add links to all the Web 2.0 news they find browsing the Web. This is our next step heading toward making Profy an ultimate source of information about Web 2.0. If you are willing to contribute to the knowledgebase created by common effort of the Profy community in the Bookmarks section, you are welcome to register with Profy and start submitting your links to share them with others and possibly receive some feedback in the comments.

Another major change is that we have added friends’ network for Profy members. You are now able to add other Profy users as your friends to view their recent activities in the blog and in the Bookmarks and Companies Directory sections right from your own profile. You are also able to invite your friends who are not members of Profy community yet to join you here using the ‘Send to a friend’ form to invite your friend to visit any page of Profy website. We are sure that we will be able to gather here a friendly community of Web 2.0 professionals with your valuable help.

We have also implemented a common authorization system for the website. Registration process for new users requires email verification. Only registered users are now able to submit news links, comments and companies into our directory. We hope this will make the community more transparent.

There are also several minor changes I will describe below.

• MyBlogLog integration. You are welcome to join Profy community at MyBlogLog.
• On the statistics page you can now see for which posts the data are still recorded (the green “Active now!” note) and for which posts the score won’t change anymore.
• Authors’ profiles now include the fields Author of the Week and Post of the Week (they display the number of Profy logos equal to the number of winning the competitions by the author; each logo links to the respective statistics page for the week when this author won the competition). You may take a look at an example here.
• We have enhanced profiles: a profile now displays articles posted by the user, the companies and bookmarks he or she submitted, and settings of informer on a separate page. Informers for our members have been refined as well: they can display the links not only to the posts authored by a certain user but to bookmarks he or she added as well.
• Trackbacks to posts in Profy blog are now clearly visible under each post. Now it is also possible to vote not only for the posts themselves but for comments to the posts as well.

So here is what we have added to this website. I hope you will enjoy the new functionality we have added and will participate actively in Profy community. We will also appreciate any feedback you might want to share about these new features – you are welcome to contact me directly via my profile.