A relative newcomer to the online dating industry, DatingDNA was launched in December of 2007 and bills itself as ‘Social Networking’s Free Dating Service’.  Incorporating a Facebook application and a recently launched IPhone app, DatingDNA allows its users to ‘integrate all their dating information across the web with one 9 digit number’.

Visually the home page is gorgeous!   The PacMan ripoff logo notwithstanding, the home page layout is extremely easy on the eyes and very well laid out.

The whole point behind DatingDNA is the compatibility score which is a number between 0 and 10 that’s generated when two Dating DNA numbers are compared.  The higher the compatibility score, the greater the likelihood for compatibility between two people.  And therein lays the catch.  The questionnaire that must be completed prior to being assigned a Dating DNA number is monstrous!  Seriously, it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to complete this thing and is very similar to the Eharmony sytstem!

The questionnaire is also used to create your ‘compatibility threshold’; again a number from 1 to 10 that each user sets for themselves and which defines the level of compatibility that other members must meet in order to view your complete profile and communicate with you.  Which is actually not a bad idea!

However, where the whole questionnaire things falls short is that you can actually go back and change any or all of the answers on your questionnaire.  Which basically means you can tweak your profile to your heart’s content in order to increase or decrease the number of matches that the system generates for you.  And so can everyone else!  In other words, if you’ve spent an hour filling this thing out, only to find that there are just a handful of matches for you, with a couple of quick fixes – presto chango you’re a ‘new’ person with a whole new set of matches!  It also explains why someone could show up on your matches one day, and be gone the next.

The questionnaire takes the place of the search function found on most other dating sites, and no such function exists on DatingDNA, although there is a basic search function available from the home page, placed there for non members to get an overview of the site.

For all of the company’s talk about bridging dating and social networking, DatingDNA’s Facebook application is an exercise in frustration.  Despite loading the app and specifying my Facebook profile URL on my DatingDNA profile, and having a friend do the same, this thing just plain doesn’t work. It’s full of bugs and doesn’t load more often than it does.  It’s really nothing more than a redirect to the website, and not a true application.  I expected better!

While I didn’t have access to an iPhone during this review I was able to view a short video demonstration of this application. From what I saw the iPhone application works much better than the Facebook app and appears to be well designed.

Aside from user profiles, the site offers its members four areas for discussion; three forums; Users helping Users, What’s New and Site Suggestions and Feedback, and a Chat Wall where you can post to your heart’s content about anything.

There is currently no advertising on the site, and it is free to join and free to use, for now.  A quick look at the FAQ’s reveals the following ‘using advertising or charging fees at some point can’t be ruled out.’  Fair enough, we all have to make a living!

Overall, the developers are on the right track in their approach to integrating dating and social networking.  The execution however requires further tweaking in my opinion.

After 3 weeks on the Facebook application network we are pleased to announce that our application went from 0 to 4,651 active users. Our goals are modest, we want to become the largest free dating application on Facebook and we believe we are well on our way.

You can visit and install this application here.

As always we look forward to any suggestions or comments you  may have about the Datepad Facebook App!

Thanks from all of us at Datepad.

Do you find it annoying when a married member tries to contact you or maybe you aren’t interested in having kids, wouldn’t it be great if you could stop other users from contacting you based on a list of preferences?

Datepad now offers all users the ability to maintain a communication requirements list and today we are starting with 4 main requirements. If you select any one of these the user will not be able to chat, message or nudge you. We are starting with 4 and will grow the list based solely on user feedback, today you can block a user if he/she is married, a smoker, has kids or is only interested in an intimate encounter.

You can access these requirements by visiting your preferences page when logged in.

As mentioned we are looking for user feedback on the expansion of this list, please add a comment with your suggestion.

As always we are busy adding new features to ensure Datepad is the best free dating site available.

All of us at Datepad are excited to announce the launch of our free dating application on Facebook. While our users are all aware of this new application as it was launched on Valentine’s Day I thought I would take some time to tell the blogging world about it.

Our goal was to incorporate all of the popular features of Datepad.com into this application while still giving it a very simple and quick user experience. Using this application you can quickly browse through thousands of profiles using the “matches” page.

While this application is designed to be basic the amount of features we have included is anything but that!

• You can upload as many as 20 photos using our new and very fast photo upload utility, which has an auto cropper and optimizer.
• We made sure to include the “Attraction in Action Matching System”
• We have also included our new astrology compatibility system, now you can quickly find out which signs work best for you and compare them against each user’s pad you visit.
• Of course you can message and nudge any user directly from the search page and within each users profile

Click Datepad Facebook App to install the application, we look forward to any and all feedback.