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Profy

The problem with most attempts to make products on the web is that developers assume that they only way to beat the competition is through laundry lists of new features. The reality is that people spend the majority of their time using the core of your product and ignore most of the extraneous fluff. My good friends over at Profy have taken this design concept to heart for their blogging platform that recently entered Alpha.


Profy

From a design perspective, it’s incredibly quick to get started. You log into your dashboard and you can see a macro-view of your blog posts, comments, RSS feeds and messages. Profy is a combination of a blogging platform and “Social Network.” You can make friends with other bloggers and share messages and content with your network right from the dashboard.

My biggest qualm with the design is that it’s done all in AJAX, which could get confusing if the menu structure ever becomes more complicated. As it stands, everything is put together very intuitively so it isn’t an issue. Other than the fact that the “Feed Reader” menu item doesn’t actually allow you to add feeds (the feed tab does) I never found myself confused by the navigation.


Features

Why do we need another blogging platform, you might be asking. Profy feels a lot more like Tumblr than it does like Wordpress. Between getting into my account and putting up my first post, I never ran into any of the hassles that more complex blogging platforms usually bring me. Not to mention the fact that there is a social aspect to this community built into the back end, which is something only Vox seems to be competing with them in.

That’s not to say everything is perfect. They only have one very basic theme available and I didn’t see any tools to edit the HTML. Next, right now they only offer a hosted solution and there doesn’t appear to be a way to use your own domain. Finally, the simplicity of it all does, unfortunately, mean that it is difficult to come up with that one killer feature that separates Profy from the pack. That being said, if nothing else, simplicity of implementation can go a long way for early adopters.


Web 2.0 Roundup

As an ALPHA product Profy shines. It does exactly what you would expect and it does it well. Though I do hope they add a few features to differentiate it from the herd, I respect the design philosophy that they are embracing. Too often developers assume that the only way to be competitive is to create bloatware. I wish the Profy team the best of luck with this and I hope to keep close tabs on this product’s development.

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