Mingle2 has had an interesting history to say the least. The original internet dating site, Mingle2, was acquired by JustSayHi, and all its members were migrated to the new site. Then JustSayHi went JustSayBye when it ran into some issues with a large search engine (maybe you’ve heard of them?), so it underwent another name change to OnePlusYou. OnePlusYou then changed its name back to Mingle2. I would assume all of this was quite confusing to members so let’s hope that for their sakes mingle2 will be the last change.

Having said all that, I was prepared to dislike this site, but I have to admit that my first impression of this site is favorable. The color selection of orange, green, yellow and gray is an interesting one and surprisingly enough it works. I’ve seen some merged sites that seemed to take the worst of both and the end result was a disaster, but not so here.

The site is well designed with a clean uncluttered look. Since membership is free, this site relies on advertising for its revenue, and I didn’t find the advertising placements intrusive. They’re there, but not in your face like on some other free dating sites. In some cases it’s hard to tell the ads from actual content so be sure to look for the “Ads by xyz” before clicking and ending up somewhere you’d rather not go.

The sign up process is relatively painless, though I would have appreciated the opportunity to fully browse the site without having to register for a profile.

You can choose to do your own searching via the basic and advances searches, or let the system do the work for you with “mutual match”. This feature will bring up a seemingly endless list of profiles to which you can reply either “yes”, “no” or “maybe”. Although I initially liked this feature, it becomes tiresome after awhile so now I just ignore it, preferring to use the advanced search or “who’s online” feature.

If you find yourself in need of assistance, there is a help section available with frequently asked questions. The only problem with it is that you have to return to your profile page to find it. Once I figured that out all was good, but there should be a link to the FAQ’s on every page.

The community forum is well attended and has a wide variety of topics for discussion. Like all forums they can be a great time waster and a lot of fun. You’ll find a wide variety of opinions here, so tread carefully; some of them are not for the faint of heart.
Communication with other members is easily accomplished using the email and chat functions. I really found the “who can mail me” feature very handy. You can easily select who can contact you via the site’s email or instant messaging by selecting the gender, age range and distance from you of people you’d like to hear from. In addition you can block the following users; married, looking for intimate encounter, those who smoke, and those who drink.

All in all, a good site and definitely a worthy Datepad competitor!

Datehookup, one of our larger competitors has been having what seems to be a lot of problems inside the Google search engine. Last week, their website had been completely removed for every search result, including if you searched for their own name. Thankfully for them, their website has now returned to the Google index for when you search for their name, but it is still questionable as to if the site is 100% back in order, of if they have a penalty of some sort on their domain and that their overall rankings for lots of search results is now lower.

Only time will tell, but I wonder what Datehookup did to get temporarily removed/banned from Google, or if it was just a random temporary problem. At any rate, hopefully they are doing everything ethical and it was just a Google malfunction and that they are back at full pace, because the more competitors Datepad has, the harder we will work to make Datepad the ultimate free internet dating website.

Datepad and staff are proud to announce that we have hit another milestone!  We now have over 10,000 unique member profiles on our website.  This is a major milestone for a free internet dating company because there are not many startup companies that can reach such a high number in such a short amount of time.

Thanks to everyone for the support, and we look forward to our next milestone of 25,000.  Wish us luck!

JDate is owned by Spark Networks Limited, a subsidiary of Spark Networks Inc., a company that operates a number of internet dating websites. This particular one is a niche site aimed at Jewish singles and is available in English, French and Hebrew.

My overall impression of this site is that it’s okay, however there are some things that definitely need attention. Whether an online dating site requires a fee or is free to use, it’s incredibly annoying when you can’t check it out fully without having to register for an account. Guest users of JDate are limited to viewing only one page of the search results. In order to view more, you must register. I wanted to view more, so I registered. Ughh!

The site design is fine, although I found it a bit strange that a site aimed at Jewish singles had Christmas related advertising, but maybe that’s just me! Navigation is easy enough. I found it annoying that on my wide screen LCD monitor, JDate shows up on the extreme right hand side, I kept looking for a scroll bar to center it, but no such luck.

To hear JDate tell it, there’s quite a bit you can do with your free membership; post a profile and photo, search and view profile, receive and reply to IM’s when you’re online (but not send), but the biggest downfall of a free membership on this site, like so many others, is that you can’t email anyone. Even if you are a paid member, there’s no way of knowing if someone else is a paid member, so you run the risk of emailing a lot of people who’ll never read your stuff and have no way to reply to you.

This site is expensive. There are two membership plans; Standard and Premium. A Premium membership plan includes a highlighted profile and inclusion in the Member Spotlight. A standard membership gets you lumped in with the rest of the cast of thousands. Standard plan prices are 39.99/month for a one month membership, $33.33/month for three months and $24.99/month for 6 months. Premium will cost you $49.99 for one month, $41.33/month for three and $30.99/month for six.

There are no prorated memberships, so if you pay for three months, you can hide your profile but you ‘ll be out the $$ if you decide to cancel before your subscription runs out.

The sign up process takes a bit of time, although you can skip the fields where you describe yourself in detail and fill them out later.

Unless you opt out of receiving notifications, you’ll find your email inbox overflowing with JDate emails to the tune of three or four PER DAY. That’s just way too many. Even though I asked to be contacted twice a week, I received daily updates about who’s viewed me. I guess that’s one way of drumming up business, but in all honesty, it just ticked me off that they didn’t do as I requested.

And after spending all that time filling out my profile, including the fact that I’m interested only in men between the ages of 50 and 60, I was emailed “matches” with men who were 10 years younger! May be good for the ego, but does nothing for the site’s credibility.

A feature that I did like was the ability to create a “custom list” ie “interesting but lives far away” or “talked to on the phone” or “never again in a million years!”. You get the idea. It goes beyond what a lot of other sites have, and if you’re heavily into internet dating with this particular site, I can see it being a handy little “black book” so to speak.