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.

Launched in December of 2007, Zoosk is a relative newcomer to the online dating world, but it’s already made an impact. In addition to the site itself, Zoosk applications are available for a number of popular social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace.

The site has a nice clean design. It’s fun and it’s friendly, even if it is a bit juvenile. The use of color is pleasantly muted, doesn’t overpower, and the Zoosk logo is catchy.

The site is very easy to use, and all aspects are easily available from the main page. Even if English isn’t your main language, Zoosk offers services in twelve other languages including French and Spanish.

Creating a profile is painless, and you do have the option of creating what I call a skeletal profile (one that has just some basic information) before you decide to bare your soul to the rest of the world.

The search is a breeze to set up. Besides age range, you can request matches within a 160 km radius or less, and narrow down the results by height, religion, relationship status, children, ethnicity, education and political outlook.

The help section is easy to use and has answers to questions that users will commonly ask. If the answer you’re looking for isn’t available there’s an easy to follow link for Customer Support.

Zoosk policy requires that users have at least one photo on their profile, though there is no mention of what you cannot do on the site without one! In other words, if you have only one photo on your profile, you can’t delete it without first uploading another one. Now if they’d only do something about all those profiles that show someone’s boat/motorcycle/house/garden etc.! A note of caution to those who install the Zoosk application on a social networking site; Zoosk will adopt the picture from your social network profile until such time as you upload another photo to Zoosk. So don’t be fooled into thinking your profile doesn’t have a photo, because it just might!

As a non-premium member “the system may restrict you from continuing conversations with other non-premium members”. I find this sentence incredibly annoying. What’s with this “may” business? Does it or doesn’t it? It’s difficult to understand, just from reading this. I had a further look through the Help section and only premium members have unrestricted communication access, although non-premium members can initiate contact to and reply to communications from premium members.

There appears to be a syncing issue between the Zoosk site and the Facebook application. Users have told us that if the app is downloaded into Facebook, and they then go to the site and create a profile, once they return to Facebook their profile information doesn’t transfer. Definitely annoying.

The search uses your location to initiate searches which is fine; however, you cannot search for members outside of a 160 km radius, which is incredibly restrictive! Mind you this is easily overcome by changing your own location, but really shouldn’t be necessary. Given that this is a global application, I’d like to be able to search for anyone, anywhere, just because I’m curious! You know what they say about the grass being greener!

Like some other internet dating sites reviewed here, this site is reluctant to part with pricing information before you’ve created a profile. We’ve taken the guesswork out of it for you because we believe that’s just nonsense! Fees for Zoosk are $12.50 per month for six months, $17.49 per month for three months or $24.99 for one month. Accounts paid by credit card will be automatically renewed. As with all other paid dating sites that we’ve reviewed, Zoosk has a “no refund” policy, so if you sign up for a six month membership, and decide to cancel after three months, Zoosk gets to keep your money! It’s buyer beware.

It’s become abundantly clear that SpeedDate.com’s security policy needs a complete overhaul if it is to overcome the serious breach it experienced on February 3, 2009. For approximately thirty minutes, though it could have been longer, access to user accounts required only a user name and no password.

By simply typing in a user name and clicking on “log in”, user accounts were seriously compromised as anyone could have, and did, gain access to accounts that were not their own. And by doing so, they were able to access the user’s email, account information and other personal information including their contact list.

All we can say is “Wow!”. And not in a good way.

Any internet dating or social network site is built on the information that the members supply, and that information is given on the premise that the information is secure. In SpeedDate’s case that premise has been sorely tested.

This is not the first time that controversy and criticism has come raining down on the company. Just over a year ago the company faced censure from Facebook after SpeedDate bought several non dating related Facebook applications and converted the users of the apps to SpeedDate application users without permission. The result was a temporary ban from Facebook.

Here’s a company that not only buys members through what can only be described as underhanded methods, but now treats its database as some sort of all you can eat buffet. If I were a SpeedDate member, I’d yank my membership and look for a site that treats my personal information securely.

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.

Good grief, I barely know where to start! I guess the easiest way is to open my MS Word program and find synonyms for the word awful!

Since I have to start somewhere, let’s begin with the name. SYL which is short for Search Your Love. The acronym itself puts me in mind of some horrible sexually transmitted disease, and the full blown version isn’t much better. If I’m going to “search my love”, I’d rather he were in the room with me so we could take our clothes off in front of a nice cozy fire and get busy.

The pages on this site are incredibly slow to load. It took easily between 30 seconds to two minutes between pages, which is incredibly irritating and just makes me want to go somewhere else. In the grand scheme of things, two minutes isn’t a long time, but in the online world, it’s an eternity.

The search function is an absolute joke. Apparently the developers are unable to count past fifty, since that’s where the age range stops. Whether you’re 50 or 85, SYL classifies you at 50+. So if you’re looking for a 60-65 year old guy, you’ll get more than you asked for. Past country, and in some cases, a city, there is no further geographical filter. There’s no filter for interests or relationship type, just sex, age range (limited), country, city and whether or not the profile should have a photo.

At first glance, it appears that this site has quite a lot of content. Once you take a closer look though, you’ll find that the content (for lack of a better word) is limited in scope, of very poor quality, and the most “recent” articles date from 2006. In internet terms, they’re from the Stone Age. It’s evident that the site is run by people for whom English is a second language, and they have not taken the time, nor spent the money, to ensure that the translation is up to par. Pages are littered with spelling and grammar errors, which, when all is said and done, is in keeping with the overall lack of quality on this site.

Where designed is concerned, the developers weren’t. Other than an okay logo, the site’s layout is generic without original or innovative concepts. It’s boring and unimaginative.

Site navigation is easy enough. I mean how difficult can it be to click on a tab? Where it bogs down is in the page load time as mentioned above.

Given all its shortcomings, and there are many, this site just feels sordid and more than a bit shady. Hey, you can even pimp your own photo and become a “leader”! According to the explanation you can “Become famous and promote yourself! The rules are simple. Make your bet higher then any of existent, and you’ll become a leader. Each minute you’ll be charged with 1 bet.” (see what I mean about the grammar!?). Each “bet” will cost you $1.00, and they’ll be more than happy to accept PayPal. Geez, I’ll sleep easier tonight knowing that, thanks. A scam is a scam is a scam. ‘Nuff said.

This site claims to have over 2 million members. A quick search through the profiles reveals that a lot of them are duplicates, and I recognized quite a few photos that were ripped off from modeling agencies websites. If you’re a legit user of this site, do yourself a favor; delete your profile pronto. There are a number of reputable free internet dating sites, but SYL sure isn’t one of them.

Launched in late 2007, it didn’t take long for online speed dating’s Speeddate.com to generate controversy, and not in a good way! If you were one of hundreds of thousands of Facebook members who used the “Have You Ever”, “Would You Rather” or “Romantic Gifts” apps, you may remember feeling rather hijacked when you logged into Facebook last fall only to find that your participation in these apps meant that you were now signed up for Speeddate.com. Whether you wanted to be a member or not, there was no choice given ahead of time, and users were notified only after the change had been made. I can only imagine some of the discussions (aka fights) that resulted in relationships around the globe. I’m sure that more than a few people were handed their walking papers after their partners discovered their dating site membership! Hardly publicity of the good kind.

Speeddate.com is a serious competitor to woome.com, and like its opponent differs from traditional dating sites just as in person speed dating differs from regular dating. It won’t appeal to everyone, particularly those who appreciate the relative anonymity of traditional internet dating sites, people with limited computer access and/or skills, and those who don’t want to have to worry about having a bad hair day.

Their sign up process is simple enough and membership is free but, and it’s a BIG BUT, you’re only notified AFTER you’ve signed up for a “free” membership that there is in fact a two tier membership structure. The withholding of this information by companies and websites in general drives me crazy. I know you want members but I have to say that you’ll turn a lot of people off with this kind of nonsense. I for one cancelled my membership as soon as I found that premium memberships are pricey; $15.99/mo for 6 months, $19.99/mo for 3 months or $24.99 for one month. Payable via credit card.

Even then it’s not really clear what the exact differences are between free and premium memberships. There’s a list of benefits associated with a paid membership, but I’d like to see an easy to understand chart that compares the features available for both types.

The look and feel of the site is okay, but nothing special. Given that this site is just over a year old and is tapping into the supposed next phase of internet dating, that’s a disappointment. I’d expected something with a bit more edge.

Navigation is pretty easy, all areas of the site being readily accessible from your home page with the use of clearly labeled tabs. The search feature is seriously flawed. Geographically you can search worldwide, in your country, or near you. Which means that if you live in the States and want to speed date with people in Germany because you’ll be spending some time there next month, you’re out of luck. Similarly, you can’t filter by interest, ethnicity, religion, the list goes on. A major turnoff in my book. Without these filters, the speeddate.com matching system will parade an endless list of “dates” for you to either okay or reject. And that kind of defeats the whole purpose of speed dating doesn’t it? Which is to save time!

Besides being disappointed in the look of the site, the content of the site (besides the profiles) is limited to poorly moderated forums. After going through them I have serious doubts that anyone on the back end is even looking at these. Scores of unanswered questions to the site administrators, objectionable language and name calling seem to be the order of the day. Thanks but no, I graduated from Grade Two years ago!

Speeddate.com, an interesting idea with flawed execution.

Woome.com launched what it calls its online introduction platform in November of 2007. According to the site Woome.com uses video and allows “users to meet, see, and hear people live in 1-minute conversations. Users can instantly experience the exhilaration of meeting five people in five minutes in topical sessions straight from their webcam. “

Online introduction platform? Meet five people in five minutes? Sounds like internet speed dating! This is essentially what this is. Think video conferencing meets speed dating.

After a very quick sign up process, less than 30 seconds including the mandatory photo upload, you can basically dive right in and join one of a number of sessions, or start your own. Your home page has a list of sessions and a countdown to when they start. Simply click on the join button and wait for the session to begin. Hover your mouse over the thumbnails to see who’s already joined the session. Once it starts you’ll have five minutes to talk to five people. That’s it, time’s up! Seriously though, there is an option to dramatically increase your chat time to a whopping three minutes. Talk fast.

There’s a handy link on your homepage that you can use to check that your microphone and (optional) webcam are functioning properly. You don’t have to have a webcam to join Woome.com as there are audio sessions available, but really, what would be the point?

You can also search for members geographically, by sex, and by interests, but the geographic search for anyone outside of the USA and the UK is severely limited. If you’re in Montreal, Canada and want to hook up with others from your city, well, good luck scrolling through all those Canadian profiles.

Site navigation is quick and easy with tabs that expand when your mouse is placed on them. The overall look here is cool and modern. The layout is definitely designed for the younger generation whose attention spans are notoriously short.

Free to join, and free to use and woo, if you decide that you want to exchange personal contact information with anyone they will ask to you cough up a dollar, a euro or a pound, depending on your geographic location. I’m curious as to how they enforce this. I mean what’s to stop me from telling someone my email address in an online conference? And of course nowhere on the site are the mechanics behind this explained. What can I say, I’m a stickler for detail.

Woome won’t replace traditional internet dating sites, it’s a different, faster and more immediate experience, and likely won’t appeal to older users or to anyone who prefers the anonymity and privacy afforded by the traditional sites.

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.

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.