To the best of our knowledge Datepad has become the first Dating Application on Facebook to receive Verified status. What does this mean? The folks over at Facebook have a list of requirements, some of them we now know and some of them we’re still not too clear about!. Depending on how your application works this process can be a tad arduous; for Datepad it wasn’t too bad.

Facebook is  trying to make the application network a better place. One of their major concerns is spam; they don’t want apps sending more notices and friend requests than need be. Many apps that have been successful on the network simply won’t qualify. Sadly these spammy practices are the main reasons many applications have done so well.

During the verification process Facebook was also concerned about the look and feel of the application; they don’t want users to think the apps are created by Facebook. Many developers have made their applications practically mimic the exact look and feel of a Facebook page. For the average none tech savvy user this could come across as misleading so I understand why Facebook is doing this.

The big question is was it worth it? It’s too early to tell and this might be tough to measure regardless. Facebook has added special areas within the application directory to highlight Verified apps, so in theory this should drive more traffic. Truth be told most applications growth is through the news feed and through friend requests. What I do know as a user is that if I were faced with two similar applications, one being verified and the other not,  I would be inclined to go the verified route. Building credibility in any market is tough and in the online world, whether it is a social network or a dating site, one could argue it is even tougher.

Facebook has made some changes over the past couple of months and I thought I would take some time to let you know how Datepad has changed with them. The first change  was the launch of Facebook “Pages”, which basically revamped the old “groups”. Pages are very similar to user profiles expect they are public. The brand, in this case Datepad, has a much better way to communicate with our fans as well as giving us the ability to add more features than were  previously available. Today we are posting some of our articles on the “pages” which gives another way for us to share and be a part of the users experience with Datepad.

Another more recent change was to the application directory and the application profile pages. The directory has moved its focus towards the verified applications. These applications have been verified by Facebook. What does this mean exactly?  Aside from a developer paying $375 USD, we’re not totally sure. Datepad has been told by Facebook that we’re in the queue and hopefully that means we’ll receive our verified application status shortly!  The profile pages are now more similar to the public profile pages mentioned above and again this gives Datepad the ability to better communicate with our users. If you have any questions about the application or just want to make a comment, this is the place to do it.

We are always looking at new ways to get the word out about Datepad; more members are always our focus. Providing Facebook pages and applications that have value added features and content will continue to be our goal going forward.

In the coming weeks we have some big news, so stay tuned!

All the best,

The Datepad Team!

Things are moving along nicely in the FB application world.  We’re quite excited about the rapid growth we’ve seen over the last two months and look forward to unveiling new features to Datepad and to our Facebook application.

So far we’ve hit the 6 figure mark and today we sit at 110,106 monthly active users which puts us as one of the more popular dating applications. From a development stance we continue to tinker with the communication we have with our members. It becomes a bit of a fine art as you don’t want to overdo things and spam your members nor do you want to give up getting users back to the site. We hate applications or web sites that send too many notifications and emails and, trust me, in this industry there are plenty of them, especially on Facebook.

With Facebook ’s new streaming API more developers are going to come up with clever ways of using the feed. We have implemented a new horoscope widget that isn’t growing exactly how we would have hoped but is driving traffic to the application. While the new stream capabilities will give many app developers the ability to drive traffic through the feed, dating is a personal experience and does limit a dating application’s ability to exploit the stream. We do have some great ideas in the queue and will share them with you in future posts.

We now have many competitors that are doing very well with the iphone application network and some of the new design ideas and apps are quite good. The future is, without a doubt, in applications and making your site and systems accessible through more than just one channel. Web sites need to be more than just a web site; social media is forcing us to become more of a brand than just a single domain. Setting it and forgetting it just doesn’t work anymore!.

As always we appreciate any feedback you can give us; on the site, our application on Facebook and anything else you wish to comment on.

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.

When creating Datepad, we knew that the world of internet dating, and social networks were full of spammers, and people trying to scam you into elaborate schemes. Have you ever received a message from someone in Nigeria asking to deposit $12 million dollars into your account - but you need to pay a bank verification fee or something of the like? This is a classic scam, and although it sounds too farfetched to be anything but a joke, over 50,000 people fall victim to these scams each and every year. In some cases, individuals lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many new start-ups in the dating and social networking field do not even pay attention to this terrible reality allowing their site to become overrun by illegitimate, thieving crooks - many situated in Africa and the Ivory Coast. At Datepad, we took a different stance. We wanted to make our site the safest, and cleanest for all of our members - on the top of our priority list was dealing with these scammers and spammers.

While there is no effective way to fully eliminate this problem, we have taken some pretty remarkable steps in reducing the occurrences.  Datepad has developed proprietary methods to detect, remove and block unwanted visitors; these methods have proved to be very successful. While I can’t share the entire process with you for confidentiality reasons, I would like to give you some insight into the actions and systems we use against spammers.

Some of the basic steps we take to ensure a safe and clean environment are ways to stop automated programs (also known as bots) from sending out messages to our members. You will notice that when sending a message you are asked to enter a human verification word which effectively eliminates automated activity.

We also have an automated intelligent system in place that scans outgoing messages for known phrases and structure that are commonly found in scam e-mails. E-mails that hit a certain threat level are automatically removed from the system. In keeping with the privacy of our members, this system is fully automated - and not human moderated. We review only the messages that are caught for exception to further increase our matching algorithms.

A third, and very important step that we take to limit the spread of this scam, is not publishing our members e-mail addresses anywhere on the site. All messaging is done internally, and notifications are sent to our members. This adds an additional layer of privacy to all of our members, as they have the ability to easily report and block scam activity, keeping their personal e-mails safe.

While there are many more aspects to our systems used fight the scammers, I will be saving some for future posts. I hope that we can further educate people about scams so that we can save someone less informed from losing money to these crooks. As always, if you suspect a scammer is on Datepad, please send in an abuse ticket so that our support team can address and rectify the situation.

I would like to start off by welcoming you all to a new series of posts that we are going to be doing on the Datepad blog regarding the inner workings of a full featured, free internet dating site. My name is Regan Johnson, and I am the Technical Director here at Datepad. Our goal for this segment is to bring the tech savvy and tech interested crowd a closer look at some programming tactics, design philosophies, and monetizing schemes that are put in place on Datepad.com on a daily basis.

When starting to develop Datepad, we had many team brainstorming sessions on the topic of how we could offer more features all while keeping the site easy enough for even the most novice user. This is one of our core goals when adding any new feature to Datepad - ease of use. Everything we have done has been meticulously thought out and calculated from our comprehensive business plan, to even the smallest of features.

The result is a site that rivals even the most expensive paid sites on the internet in terms of features and accessibility. A lot of planning went into the mechanics of each system (messaging, nudges, photos, articles, forums, etc.) and how they interacted with other systems. Since our initial plan, there have been many additions and tweaks that would have been a nightmare to implement without such a strong initial blueprint.

It has been said by many analysts that you will see a strong decline in fly by night web businesses that don’t have a solid business plan. It is always important to work a new feature out a few steps ahead, and take into consideration all of the possible outcomes or future feature implementations. Even if you decide not to include a specific function at the time of launch, having a solid framework that can support this feature down the road will save many hours or days of development.

In further posts, I will be discussing topics such as our picture upload system, the constant war against spammers (and what we are doing to stay on top), our advanced search techniques, our proprietary matching technology and much more! I look forward to bringing our users a more intimate and closer look at Datepad!

We are pleased to announce the Datepad Attraction in Action Matching System.

After an exhaustive search for some of the best relationship experts in the country we have managed to put together what we believe is the most accurate matching system available today.

Here are some areas some key areas we focused on while building our system.

1. It had to work! This might sound silly but we tested our system extensively on real couples, some dating for only months, others had been married for decades and everyone in between. I can say from my own experience, when my wife and I completed the matching system it said we were a great match we scored 84%, (Thank goodness) the interesting part was the areas where we traditionally have issues in our relationship came up in our results. Not only does this work well with those of you looking for that special someone but it also helps those who are in committed relationships understand their partner just a little better.
2. We wanted our survey to be as short as possible. No one likes to stare at a screen for hours answering questions, it reminds us of High School and College. Our competitors average between 75 and 100 questions, this didn’t make sense to us as in most cases the questions where repeated or they asked which type of music you like?? I can honestly say I have rarely dated anyone with similar musical taste and it has never really mattered! 25 questions is all you have to answer, short but more importantly incredibly effective.
3. Instant results. Instead of waiting for a system to email you matches, our system gives you instant results with every users profile you view. On top of this there is a detailed list explaining where you will succeed and areas where you might struggle. The Datepad Attraction in Action Matching System isn’t here to tell you whom to date we simply want to give you enough info for you to make an informed decision. Let’s face it we have all had partners in the past with major flaws that we were able to work around, as the saying goes “love knows no boundaries.”
4. A personality assessment. It was important for us to give you an overview of your personality, a way to show that our system is doing more than just matching you with others. Most users are quite shocked how accurate the assessment is of their personality.
5. It had to look great. With everything we develop at Datepad it had to look great and be user friendly. One of the most frequent compliments we get at Datepad is how clean and fresh our site is, our survey fits into the site beautifully.

We truly believe we have hit the mark with this new Matching System and hope you agree and can find that special someone with it!

Thanks from all of us at Datepad!

With popularity brings spammers for any internet startup company.  Spammers have automated everything on big social networks like Myspace because the developers are too busy lining their pockets from  advertising dollars.  Unlike them, we at Datepad are all about bringing the community the best possible site.   With that being said, we have had a few spammers try to abuse our  website, and they have had their accounts permanently terminated.

The staff at Datepad have implemented many features that will thwart  spammers.  Due to the nature of the security fixes, we cannot tell you  what they are, but they are working behind the scenes so you can avoid having a mailbox that is full of spam.

Another major component or getting rid of spammers on Datepad is through  our community.  We have a feature that allows you to report every spam  message that you receive, which will be forwarded directly to one of our  Datepad staff members who will asses the request and remove the spammer at the click of a button.  We hate spam as much as you  do, so we recommend that you report any unsolicited private message you  receive from a spammer.  In addition make sure that you never give out your personal  details or your passwords to anyone that you do not trust.

Unlike most community sites, Datepad has a team of 3+ people  checking the backend of the site on a daily basis to ensure spammers are  terminated before they get out of control.  This is one of the big  things that our competitors are missing, and by reading a lot of their  blogs and forum posts, they are slowly killing their own websites.  The  power is in the people, and that is why Datepad strives to make your  experience in online dating the best it can be.

At the end of the day, we have a ton of security features in place to  lock down the majority of spammers, but as a community we rely on you to  report any suspicious activity that you may see for the benefit of  everyone else.  Happy Dating!