MakeFriendsOnline.com

It’s a new kind of community/dating site, not your usual meat market. I first found out about MakeFriendsOnline or MFO to its users while perusing a Which report on dating sites. I'd never paid for dating sites as I consider them a waste of money but the glowing report prompted me to take a looksee.

First impressions
The sign in page is a colourful purple with a big white border. The logo itself is a cute rainbow which is oddly ...
...and groups of all ages to emphasise the point that this is not a thinly disguised meat market, although dating is the primary draw for most people. There is a big yellow button allowing you to register for free as well as a panel for making searches. Next to this a summary of what is available on the site. You can login via this screen, read testimonials, retrieve your password, contact the site owners, become an affiliate – which allows you to link ... more

It’s a new kind of community/dating site, not your usual meat market. I first found out about MakeFriendsOnline or MFO to its users while perusing a Which report on dating sites. I'd never paid for dating sites as I consider them a waste of money but the glowing report prompted me to take a looksee.

First impressions
The sign in page is a colourful purple with a big white border. The logo itself is a cute rainbow which is oddly welcoming. There are some pictures of happy laughing couples and groups of all ages to emphasise the point that this is not a thinly disguised meat market, although dating is the primary draw for most people. There is a big yellow button allowing you to register for free as well as a panel for making searches. Next to this a summary of what is available on the site. You can login via this screen, read testimonials, retrieve your password, contact the site owners, become an affiliate – which allows you to link to their site and get paid for introducing new members and finally some information about the company. Again the overall impression is a friendly safe online place to meet people or partners. And so, into the lions den…

Registration
First up, I tried the search in the front panel and got a screen advising I had matched thousands of women and now needed to register. Since it was free, I went ahead and created a erm, witty login name. All that’s required then is a password, which you have to confirm, choose your gender, your sexuality i.e. heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, what you are looking for which can range from anything to marriage. I plumped for friendship to start off with. Once you’ve provided your location, email address and read the rules, you click a button and you’re now a member.

Features
There is a lot going on here, when you log in, you get a panel which shows what services are available. I was impressed to see the Meets manager where all meetings organised by MFO or members are displayed. You can sign up for any that are public and aren’t full. You can even sign up as a maybe and change your mind later if you like. It is simple enough to use and is a great selling point of the site.

For those who enjoy surveys, you can answer the big question which changes regularly and see what the overall opinion of members is or if problem pages are more your thing, there is an agony aunt Sophie who answers all your tricky life problems. All the other usual suspects are here, a search page, a page to see who is online so you can chat to them or mail them, email, a one-to-one chat facility to speak to one person at a time, a chat board with a nice range of rooms for various topics and the daddy of them all – the message boards.

The message boards are a divided up into various interest groups for example newbies for new members, 18-30, 30+, 40+, books corner, cooks corner, love hurts … and so on. You can add new topics or contribute to existing topics or threads… and with us all being human, this is the most volatile but exciting place on MFO. Friendships are forged, enemies made and people chat to thousands of other people every day by posting messages – members are mainly from the UK but coming from USA, Hong Kong and other far flung places. These boards can be daunting to the newcomer as each board appears to have a hard core group of people who rule the roost. However, new people are encouraged to take part, you may even get an email from a total stranger asking you to come on to a board and say hello. To keep the peace and prevent a total degradation into anarchy, there is usually a member of admin patrolling threads and you can report a thread as offensive if needs be.

The other selling point is the buddies system. You can add people to your buddies and people can add you to theirs similar to an instant messaging system. This way you can see which of your buddies are online and have a nice chat. A feature I quite liked here was the buddy approval, so people have to get your permission to become your buddy.

There are several other features which MFO offers including blocking users who pester you and extending your profile by adding pictures or filling in some quizzes. Filling these in allows you to check if someone else is compatible with you or not and which interests you share.

Cost
The free membership is limited, you can view the site, update your profile but not do much else. Joining as a full member allows you full use of all facilities. There are varying costs depending on how long you want to try it out for ranging from £15 for 3 months to just under £50 for a year. When you come to renew, you may get a special reduced price, existing members are paying about £20 to renew for 12 months.

Conclusion
A full 12 month membership is excellent value at about the same cost per month as a meal deal at some fast food outlets. If you enjoy meeting people in the real world, you will like this site as there were at least 30 meets organised the last time I looked. A lot of effort has been put in to make this a friendly community despite the little niggles I experienced. For example the chat site requires java and wouldn’t work until I downloaded some extra software. Also in the message boards, there is no indication of which messages you have read and you can only post text not pictures, the site news page is blank and the one-to-ones looks very amateurish. Also, you can’t tell who isn’t a full member, so therefore can’t respond to your emails and when the person was last online.

Overall I enjoy visiting the site and will be signing up soon as I know a few full members who are having a blast and I’m keen to join in on a meet… so what are you waiting for? Check it out.
 

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