FriendFin Review

in this FriendFin Review, I take an in depth look at one of the newest, and fastest rising stars in the free online dating game. However, as you’ll see in my review, this site isn’t nearly all it’s cracked up to be, and if you’re looking for a good free online dating site, there are plenty out there that are far superior. However, I should say that FriendFin isn’t the worst of the free dating sites I’ve looked at over the years either. It’s definitely got its good points too. But overall, I think you’ll find that this site is probably one you should miss. I would also like to say that in general I love that there are new sites out there that are challenging the more established dating sites out there. It means that the whole lot of them will hopefully improve and give us daters more features, fun, and possible frolics with other singles out there!

ABOUT

FriendFin was started back in 2009, which means as far as dating sites go, it’s really one of the new klds on the block. Breaking into the online dating game can be tough, so FriendFin’s gimmick is that it is completely, one hundred percent free. It’s not one of those dating sites that start off with a free membership and then make you upgrade to enjoy the site like eHarmony. It’s free from top to bottom, although there is a “Donate” button that you can choose to use if you feel like supporting the site out of the goodness of your heart. Yeah, right.

So, let me tell you the very first thing that I tried on FriendFin, and you can see why it was a disappointment right off the bat. On their homepage, before I had even started pluggin in my information for my profile creation, there were a bunch of pictures at the bottom of a sampling of their members. I guess they were to show how popular and attractive their site’s members are, and entice people like you and I into joining. One particular woman was pretty, and you can see her in the pic below. She’s the one in the yellow top.

I decided to look at her profile more closely.

Now as you can see, she’s pretty But something about the pic seemed suspicious to me – like someone had taken a pic of a pretty woman off the web and used it as their own. So, I decided to plug that pic of her into a reverse image search engine, and found out that she is in fact some young woman that put a bunch of her pics up on a photo sharing site years ago and they went viral. In other words, she’s not a member on the site – someone has taken that photo and used it as their profile pic in a fake profile on the site. Not a good beginning.

So I realized that FriendFin fell victim to the same problem that most of the free dating sites have: tons and tons of fake or abandoned profiles. You see, since it’s free, there’s nothing to stop anyone from posting a profile up there with pics they grab off the web, and then watch as poor duped suckers like you and me email those profiles with the honest intention of meeting new singles for dating. In fact, I’m sure “whoever” put that pic and profile up gets quite a kick out of people emailing them trying to set up a date with a person that doesn’t actually exist.

 

DATING FEATURES

Now, even though it was a bad start, I decided to fill in a profile myself (although mine would be a real one), and give the site a try for the month. Obviously I was ready to have a lot of my emails end up in fake and abandoned profiles, but that’s the price you pay for not paying a price for some free dating sites. My profile too about two minutes to finish, and I was off. I looked around the site, and there’s a few good features to it. The email and search pages are good, and they’ve got a good section with articles on dating. They also have web chatting. Unfortunately there isn’t much else to the site, but I guess that’s the way it goes when it’s free.

PRICE

100% free.

DRAWBACKS

As you probably figured out by now, the problem I had with this site is the proliferation of fake and abandoned profiles on the site. In fact, of the 175 emails I sent out to attractive women, I only received 38 responses. That is an incredibly low amount of replies, compared to some of the other free sites I’ve used. Another problem with the site is that its profile is so basic (it only took me a couple of minutes to complete), that the matches it comes up with for you aren’t very specific. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only criteria it had for matching women with me was that they lived somewhere within 200 miles of me. That’s it. Now I’m not saying they’ve got to get to know my soul to find suitable matches, but a little more comprehensive profile information gathering would have been preferred.

REVIEW CONCLUSION

After a month of using the site for about half an hour each night, I got 38 replies to my 175 emails. Of those 38 women, I set up 18 first dates, 15 of which showed up. The fifteen were very nice, but there wasn’t a real connection with any of them. I think this is due to the limited matchmaking capacity of the site, thanks to its basic profile creation. There were a couple women out of the 15 that I would see again, but I know it wouldn’t end up in anything special. I would avoid this site, in conclusion. It was a bad return on my time and effort, and is too filled already with fake and abandoned profiles.