Downtoearth.com Review
Recently launched downtoearth.com is backed by some very big players in the internet dating market; specifically match.com. That’s right, the paid internet dating people are joining the free dating highway.
Match.com, which we reviewed earlier this year is a global internet dating giant, and it’ll be interesting to see how their foray into free internet dating plays out. I’m curious to see the reaction of match.com subscribers when they realize that what they’re paying for is now being offered for free.
The Good Stuff
The downtoearth.com home page is easy on the eyes and well laid out with nice soft colors and good font size. It gives a quick overview of the site’s mission (100% real people. 100% free to use), and they really push the “honest, accurate and free” aspects of the site. They’ve taken the step of opening this site only to Americans and Canadians. It is believed that by limiting the site to Canadians and Americans only, there will be a reduced risk of inviting unwanted scammers to join. This conveys a false sense of security as most scammers make American or Canadian profiles when trying to scam other members. Staying on top scammers requires high end IP tracking technology and a team of administrators managing back end databases. Moreover, the last time we checked, Match.com’s largest market was Spain and Spanish America.
Sign up is simple, with easy to follow drop down boxes and button selections. Once you’ve entered your basic information, including your username, password, gender, birthday and location, you’ll be able to tell the world all about yourself by completing the rest of your profile, including photos.
I have to admit, I loved the photo utility, it’s pretty slick! Rather than dragging or moving handles to edit the photo, you end up doing the opposite by positioning the photo within the frame so it appears exactly as you want it to. You can easily zoom in or out on your photo to show as much or as little of it as you want. Each photo that’s uploaded has to be check marked “recent and accurate”. I don’t know how far that will go in actually ensuring photo accuracy though. It’s also unfortunate that you can’t caption or otherwise place a comment on your photos.
If you change your mind about anything in your profile, it’s easy enough to change, so there’s no need to worry about making mistakes!
Other pluses on downtoearth.com include an easy to read (if a bit sparse) help section, easy access to the privacy policy and terms of use.
The Bad Stuff
Where the site falls woefully short is in the search feature. If you’re not American, forget about it. For Canadians it’s totally useless, and I would imagine extremely frustrating. If you’re going to open the site to people from certain countries, then the site features should be accessible to them. Frankly, the inability of the site to service its Canadian customers is dishonest, and not in keeping with the site’s slogan.
The site cannot be accessed prior to creating a profile. In other words, you can’t test drive it before giving up your information. Free or not, I want to be able to discover what a site has to offer before joining.
Why, oh why, do site administrators still send confirmation emails that contain both the username AND the password you used to sign up. It’s simply not in keeping with security best practices. Even the password reset tool is a simple email, once again containing both username and password. Ugh!! It’s easy enough to code a proper password reset tool, so why not take the time to do so??
Like match.com, this site offers nothing, absolutely zip, in the way of additional features. There are no forums, no articles, no advice. It’s simply a matching system. With the additional features that are offered not only by Datepad, but also by other free internet dating sites, downtoearth.com has a long way to go before it’s up to par.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:51 am
Ughh …. used downtoearth when it was launched big time. But the dust is settling down now. Nah, I won’t be using it anymore, simply because of the reason mentioned in this blog. It is not searchable, we don’t know what we are getting into.
I have been looking into promatching.com recently. Apparently, it is eco-friendly, free dating site. Check it out, and let us users know if it is worthwhile to spend time over there.