Web 2.0 blogging platform Profy announced the Alpha launch of their service today. Profy combines a WYSIWYG text editor with a feed reader and a social network. A dashboard on the start page shows your posting activity, feed items, reader’s comments on your blog, and instant messages from other Profy users. You can read your blog feeds, write posts, find out what other Profy bloggers and commenters are reading in their feed readers (like sharing in Google Reader). If you don’t have visual editing skills there are tons of templates and layouts you can choose to style your blog.
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.
Profy will aim to compete with tools like Squarespace rather than Wordpress or MoveableType.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Here are some of the most popular posts published on Bandwidth blog since its launch one year ago. Thank you all for reading. Happy Holidays… (;
South Africa’s top startups to watch (Was published in print)
Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by ReadWriteWeb)
24.com launch Laaik.it social media aggregator (Breaking news)
The offices of todays internet companies (Reached the Digg homepage)
Microsoft wants Yahoo - $50 Bil (Our best rumour published of the year)
Popularity: 7% [?]
24.com, the digital arm of South African media giant Media24, has expanded it’s social networking portfolio with the launch of their video sharing service, PLAY. Earlier in the year 24.com launched Laaik.it - their content bookmarking service - which was their debut in social media market. Elan Lohmann - head of social media at 24 - informed me of PLAY a few months back to help beta test the new video sharing application.
Play has been created to enable the 24 blogging community to seamlessly create and post video content to their blogs. Although any member of the public can upload, view and discuss videos on the site with your 24.com login. Play has all the usual characteristics of a video sharing service such as ‘Flavas’ which is your content channels and your own personal profile showcasing your uploaded and bookmarked videos (Favs). 24.com have also built their own flash video player featuring media embedding functionality, full screen viewing, content rating and discovery of other videos after the clip has finished playing.
Play has numerous content channels each with their own rss feed for keeping tabs on new videos through your reader. Some of the more popular channels (Flavas) are Sport, Pets, Geek and Cars.
Conclusion
Not a bad effort for a first try keeping in mind the service is dedicated to the 24.com bloggers. The service wasn’t launched aimed at taking out the likes of Zoopy or MyVideo just yet. Although with their traffic volumes they could become the biggest video sharing site in SA over night.
The only small issue I noted was bad SEO on some pages - If you surf through the site you will see each page has the same title tag “Play - powered by 24.com” - they should automatically set the title of the page the same as the title of the video or channel page your viewing. This will help with keyword indexing for Google, Yahoo or even their own search engine, 24.
Screen shot
Viewing a video
Visit Play.24.com
Popularity: 5% [?]
