In the beta stage since launching in September of 2009, Thread.com is aptly named due to its ability to “thread” together your Facebook friends and their friends. The site has a clean modern look and feel that, along with a catchy logo, is visually appealing.
Traditional dating sites like Datepad grant their users access to their entire database of members. Herein lies the main difference between Thread.com and conventional dating sites. It doesn’t have its own database. Rather it relies solely on Facebook for its membership If you’re expecting to be able to search for dates around the world, your results will depend entirely on whom your friends are friends with, and more importantly, which of your friends accept your Thread invitation. And there’s the catch; if your Facebook friend(s) do not accept your Thread invitation, their information will not be pulled into Thread. Nor will their friends be displayed. All of which can severely limit both your potential matches and your matchmaking opportunities.
Matchmaking?? Yes my altruistic amigos; Thread.com has a dual purpose. Aside from finding yourself a date from amongst your pool of friends and their friends, the site has a feature that allows you to act as a matchmaker. The belief here is that friends of friends are more authentic and trustworthy because of the “thread” linking you to them(see, clever name!)
Signing up is done through Facebook Connect. That process itself is simple enough. Integration with Facebook can be a tricky beast to tame, and my hat’s off to the developers; it appears to work well. Once you’ve signed into Thread with your FB credentials, it will appear as an application within your FB application list. Which is a bit confusing since it’s not really a FB application, nor will you find it within the FB application search.
Thread’s Shuffle feature is intended to help you meet people or to assist you in your matchmaking endeavors. Once again, the biggest shortcoming of this feature is its dependence on your friends’ acceptance of a Thread invite. Although I don’t have a great deal of friends on FB (less than 50), I know for a fact that at least two of them use this program. Yet on two different days I got a ton shuffle results one day, and none the next. Unreliable results do not speak well of the overall backend design. It’s also limited to 25 views per day. Once you’ve “shuffled” through 25 people, you’re dead in your tracks and have to try again tomorrow. Which I did and as stated I got zero results.
The “Make Matches” feature appears to function more reliably. Select one of your friends and send them up to 20 matches. Your friend will get a FB notification and will have to accept it to view the suggestions you’ve made. In all honesty, if I had two friends that I wanted to introduce to each other, I’d just as soon do it directly than have to load yet another program to do so. Seems simpler to me.
The site’s customer support looks to be well managed. It has a forum style in which users can post questions, suggestions and ideas. Staff appears to monitor this closely; questions are responded to promptly and suggestions, ideas, praise and criticism are treated with respect and gratitude. There is little doubt in my mind that the staff genuinely cares about their users and their product. Though the current site is currently free of charge, we have heard that they will be transitioning to a “freemium” business model so be prepared to pay in the near future.
Thread has raised $1.2 million in venture funding. After five months the site appears to have a modest amount of traffic which included posts on both Techcrunch and Mashable. This concept has been tried before sans Facebook, notably with Engage.com. Thread may have a better opportunity with Facebook Connect. If they get through some of the bugs on the site they could be serious competition, provided the public is indeed ready for this type of dating service.
