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.

I thought I would take some time and share some of the more frustrating aspects of running a free dating application on Facebook.

First off let me tell you first that the Facebook developer network is an amazing tool and truly is a win, win. The developer has the ability to access the 200 million or so active members currently using Facebook, this is much easier said than done but there are very few opportunities where a company can immediately have access to such a massive network. I have to applaud what Facebook has been able to accomplish is such a short time. Nothing is ever perfect and there certainly have been a lot of users complaining about the recent changes to the feed and home page. In the end Facebook IS winning the social network war because the product is, well, really good!

And on Facebook’s side they win because the developer network and it’s 60 thousand or so applications have had a major impact on their growth. When applications become popular it keeps users on the site longer and in the end this equates to more revenue for Facebook.

So here are some of the issues - more so areas I think Facebook could improve on.

1.    The new user review system – Every application has an “About Page” within this page users have the ability to rate an application on a score of 1 to 5 stars. What has changed recently is users that don’t have your application installed have the ability  to vote. On top of this they don’t have to leave a comment when voting. I have no issue with a user leaving a candid comment about our application, but the minimum requirement should be that they have actually used the application. This would alleviate some of the random negative reviews that all developers have recently seen a surge in.

2.    Commenting on reviews - Another area I would love to see added is the ability for an administrator to comment on a review, much like commenting on a wall post. We have had some users complain that our application is lacking certain things or that we are doing things that go against our privacy policy, in all of these cases this simply wasn’t true. Because of this I would love to be able to reply to a users comments and let them know how to access a certain page or feature. This would help other users and give us and other developers the ability to retain a client and/or mitigate loosing potential users from not joining because they see a negative review.

There are of course some technical issues with the Facebook developer platform, we’ll leave those comments and review for another post.

Overall things are pretty good in the Facebook developer world, like any piece of software nothing is ever perfect. The good news is software is always an evolving entity and we fully expect Facebook to continue making improvements. Maybe if we’re lucky one of the decision makers will read this post. Fingers crossed!

For some of us the internet can be an intimidating place; what sites do you trust, what things should you look for before joining a site and, more importantly, before giving a credit card? All of us at Datepad understand this concern and because of this we have taken some extra steps to ensure you feel comfortable using Datepad.com and our Facebook application.

It was important for us from the beginning to always be above board when it comes to your private information. And while we don’t ask for very much information compared to a paid dating site your personal information should always remain just that, PERSONAL! Because of this Datepad adheres to the highest privacy policy standards in the industry and for this we have attained a Truste certificate.

I wanted to also take some time in this post to discuss what goes on with our Facebook application and give our users some information on how the Facebook application network operates.
When you install an application, any application, on Facebook you give the developer, be it Facebook themselves or Datepad Inc., the authority to post on your wall. To be very clear Datepad will only post on your wall for the following actions.

-    When you first install our application
-    When you send a nudge or a message to another user on Datepad

Please be advised that you can remove these posts from your wall at any time,  you always have the right to remove any application from your profile. Please also be advised this is a standard practice within the Facebook developer community and we here at Datepad only do this so we can grow our application and give you, the user, a larger member base to find that special someone.

As always we welcome any feedback about our site and our Facebook application.

Thank you from all of us at Datepad.

At Datepad we believe by posting regular updates about features on the site, progress in our membership size and of course posting reviews of other dating sites is something we not only love doing we believe it is value added. In continuing those efforts we have recently built our Facebook “pages” which is a great way for us to communicate with our members that use Facebook  and more importantly our Facebook Application.

On our “pages” we will post our daily dating articles, blog posts and continue an open dialogue with our members and fans. We encourage all users to become a fan of our pages and as always feel free to leave a comment or suggestion.

We have some new features in the development pipe that we look forward to telling you about in the very near future. Thank you as always for your continued support!

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.

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.