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.

Tags: datingdna, free dating, free online dating, internet dating, social network

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Dating Site Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.