The name is awful, sorry. Too hard to pronounce / understand and certainly not worth the trouble since it doesn't convey meaning.
The color scheme is ugly. I like the gradual change over the name on mouseover but purple to yellow through brown is not the most appealing... That being said the layout is good.
I'm not sure I understand the value. Friends of friends are the easiest people to meet / hookup with already. The purpose of online dating sites is to meet strangers you don't already have an in with. Is there really a problem there that needs solving?
The passive cute / not cute thing sounds interesting. Maybe make that the focus? That's something that isn't already built into Facebook and would definitely solve the problem of some awkwardness.
> The name is awful, sorry. Too hard to pronounce / understand and certainly not worth the trouble since it doesn't convey meaning.
As someone who speaks Japanese and instantly understood what the name meant, I agree. This is an absurd name to use for an American/Western dating site. I can't see myself mentioning this site to my friends.
Thanks for the feedback Sir. I am sure I will improve both the website and myself with time.
I have changed the representation of the name to make it more readable.
The value in my opinion is to discover potential dates rather than search for them, and of course the mutual connection if both parties find each other cute/handsome/attractive.
Congrats on launching and having a user base. Here are some suggestions for the landing page, where first impressions are key to this kind of service:
1. Get an editor to rework the copy and fix mistakes. There's a lot of phrases that are almost-but-not-quite correct, such as "safe friendly trust" (which is the first thing that people see)...You don't want people's mental spam-alerts to go off at first glance. A lot of the text is also awkward and slows down reading (avoid using the forward-slash...e.g. use "attractive" instead of "cute/handsome"
2. I didn't want to give access to FB to use the site so I don't know how it works other than the landing page...but is the only way to express interest is through calling someone "cute" or "handsome"? Other sites have used "I'm interested" as a way to express...well, interest.
3. Try to replace that stock photo with something unique when you can...and if you have to use a stock photo, don't use one of all white people, unless that's specifically the audience you're catering to.
4. Also, don't describe your users as "boys and girls" unless that's specifically the audience you're catering to.
5. Cut as many adjectives as you can out of the copy, it doesn't engender trust. Also, don't use the word "disciplined"...it doesn't have useful connotations in this context.
edit: After reading the About page, I have a couple more things to add:
6. There are so many reasons why people have negative feelings about traditional dating sites and you can't possibly enumerate all of them...so minimize the amount of telling people those reasons, as you make too many assumptions as is.
7. Related to that: there may be situations in which the phrase "call girls or prostitutes" is applicable, but the promotional copy for your positive online dating website is not one of them -- in any context.
All good points, but #2 stuck out the biggest for me. It's not just the wording, but the fact that the only reason I'd be interested in dating someone is because they're physically attractive.
It makes this look like Facebook Stalking Pro.
Just changing this stance to, "someone you find interesting" or better, "someone you might want to get to know better"-- leave the reason open-ended, because we all have different things we look for in people. As it stands, I'd never use the site because it sounds like your active userbase is full of people I wouldn't want to date.
I disagree. First, how do you think people usually decide to date other than by appearance? Most people in real life do not fill out a form to see if they are mutually compatible before they go out. "Hey, you're cute, I like you, let's go out."
Second, the wording is actually good as "cute/handsome". These are words that have a positive association with image without being sex-driven words, and aren't overly powerful towards seeming like a line.
Also keep in mind it's a mutual interest feature. Only once both people have listed each other as cute/handsome is a person notified, so it shouldn't result in negative behavior.
But you're right - there could be lots of reasons for interest other than attraction. Those can be individual features, like "There's someone who likes your taste in music" or "There's someone that wants to invite you to a FB event". The tool could probably be best served by allowing for a mix of these, so while Phil is attracted to Jackie's book smarts, Jackie is attracted to Phil's interest in social justice.
1. Replace that stock photo with something less rigid and fake looking. Stocksy is a good resource.[1]
2. Change the h1 and body fonts. It looks good on the company name but not elsewhere. Any good looking sans serif that isn't helvetica.
3. Change "boys and girls" to "men and women". The former implies that they are under 18 or generally young which shouldn't be the case for a (legal) dating site AFAIK.
4. On the third feature, "looks cute/handsome" doesn't really make sense, so change that. Perhaps "no risk".
5. Change "safe friendly trust" on the pink image overlay. Make the third word an adjective or adverb to match the other words.
I love that you built something. But let me be brutally honest, because that's what I would want.
I don't see the value-add. Maybe it's 2x better than e-harmony, but it's not 10x better, like some of the new competitors are.
Take Tinder for example. Dead simple app. See a picture of the a potential date nearby. Vote yes/no. If you both vote yes, it opens up a chat thread much like sms.
Tinder incorporates friends-of-friends in the ranking already. I can see how many friends I have in common with a potential match, and I'm more likely to be shown potential matches with mutual friends.
But Tinder goes a step further. It integrates with Facebook, so that it can match on similar taste in books, movies, entertainment, religion, philosophy, based on likes in the profile. Finally, from a cultural perspective, as a smartphone app it's much more free of stigma.
So I don't see the improvement here. It's a good idea, with a growing userbase, but it seems slightly behind the wave, which is defintely going to be location aware mobile dating apps.
I'm a bit of a veteran of online dating, did it for 6 years, and after quite literally hundreds dates eventually found the mother of my son. So, with that in mind -
What you describe (Tinder), and what Eharmony, Match, Guardian Soulmates or any other site does, does NOTHING to speed up the process of finding Mr. or Ms. Right.
All that a site can do is to appeal to specific character types (like to use your phone? Shy, and prefer an introduction? ...).
Facebook integration will appeal to some (you, for example) but not to others (me, for example).
If you're just looking to get laid you can game chicks on any site. If you want to meet someone to love unconditionally, you just need to bite the bullet and settle in for a long haul.
NO web site can predict chemistry or love based on some funky new process and meta data. You need to spend time with someone to see if there's anything there. This means that dating sites are little more than databases of people that maybe, hopefully want what you want. Success is when they want it with you.
I learnt quickly that I had better odds by using as many dating sites as I had time for, because (apologies to the romantics) it's a numbers game.
I'm not interested in so much finding Mr./Mrs. right. I'm interested in the business problem.
The waves I see coming are: a shift from long term romantic involvement to a trend toward shorter term interactions among my generation, a cultural lack of social stigma in smartphone apps vs. websites for dating, and an opportunity to use data that wasn't explicitly entered by the user for the purposes of impressing a prospective date.
And while no program can predict love, it can reduce transaction costs, from e.g. distance, lack of social network, social anxiety upon meeting new people, etc. That friction is leading a lot of people to sit home alone when two apartments over there's a lovely person who would be thrilled to be out on a date with them. What type of commitment they make from there is beyond the purview of the technology.
All the best to you, your wife, and family. It's fascinating and wonderful to me there are little humans running around very may not have existed without the communication the internet enables :)
Point taken, Sir. I am not in US, so I might not have the entire context, though.
I would say that the two ways I am adding value here:
1) To discover potential dates rather than search for them
2) Mutual connection if both parties find each other cute/handsome/attractive.
Please let me know if I am wrong somewhere. Thanks
Both of these are spot-on. I'm just suggesting taking a closer look at some of the competitors methods, and how're they're pursuing similar avenues.
I don't know if Tinder's popularity has hit critical mass outside certain socioeconomic groups (i.e. young adults in the United States, especially college students), but you should check it out for some inspiration and op research.
Grouper is another good startup that is attempting to break the dating paradigm. They combine intelligent matching with "group dates," which is really just a hangout session at a bar with three guys who are friends with three girls who are friends. It takes the sketchiness element out of the equation for women, and preserves more of the current cultural trend away from formal dinner dates.
If you're outside the US, it's also possible that the US competitors might let you see a space that's wide open in your country, or vice-versa.
Once again, congratulations on building something, that clearly your users want. It's so easy to criticize and so hard to create, so please understand that any feedback is meant to be constructive and is only my subjective opinion.
Thanks a lot Sir. The feedback means a lot. I am sure I am learning for the most evolved customers/entrepreneurs/techies on the planet right now. Thanks
Tinder has a rep of being more of a hook-up app (like Grindr) so having a web app may cause people to take this more seriously. This service looks like it uses Facebook to do similar things like matching on profile data.
You're right about Tinder being dead-simple though. This looks like they basically took the Tinder concept and expanded on it for desktop viewing. One of the best parts about Tinder is that it really reduces the friction for people to talk to each other while still not being totally sketchy. That's the problem with most dating sites these days.
Yeah, My thinking is that hook-up apps will disrupt the dating site market by slotting in below and rising up, innovator's dilemma style. Grouper, Tinder, Grindr, et al. are the model I believe will actually bring online dating forward.
The problem I have with most dating apps is that they try to change, rather than facilitate, normal dating patterns. When you meet someone in bar or at a party, generally all you have to go on is some brief conversation, and physical appearance (which, by the way, I'm getting sick of people saying is terrible. Physical appearance communicates far more than simple in-born beautify: from fashion to mannerisms to posture, there's a massive amount of communication that's non-verbal.) Tinder emulates that process pretty well.
I just don't know the value in custom-written interest profiles that are at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately deceptive.
What I want is a Tinder that emulates the flow of a date, all as part of the app's design:
Matching algorithm->Picture (Vine or something would be better)->(yes/no)->Text conversation->(yes/no)->Audio Conversation->(yes/no)->drink/dinner
[I'm not sure how a website that on its face seems to perpetuate the culturally normalized obsession with appearance and thus supposed sexual compatibility and success as the highest determinant of evaluating potential and real relationships, provides a service that "turns dating upside down," but]
The idea of mutual trust is dubious at best. What prevents two parties from conspiring in advance so that a third is tricked into believing things that are not true? I will say this: the majority of rapes and sexual assaults are committed by those who are very close to the victim, not by strangers -- and the rapist believes what they are doing is "sex".
> Trust and Privacy are two sides of the same coin and both are sub-optimal in dating websites because the way they are seeded
But the Terms page says:
> We may get additional information from or about you in other ways not specifically described here. We might sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent.
I wish you all the best, because online dating can always use improvement. However I warn you that it will be a great challenge to overcome what seems to be the insurmountable and persistent contours of the online dating market: that there are more men than women, and that everyone hits on the attractive people.
Also, your name strikes me as the sort of thing that you will be spelling on the phone forever. Consider changing it or at least buying typo variations.
You're definitely right on the second part. Personally, I'd just go with "Tomono" -- keeps the idea (the name is Japanese for "Friends of Friends", and "Tomono" is just the "of Friends" part), but makes it much easier to remember and to type.
I think there are more men that women in some parts of the world or in certain cultures only. In my ethnic group there are way more women than men, and due to the demands of our culture we tend to marry into our own quite a bit (but could still benefit from a site like this)
Thanks for the feedback Sir. I am sure I will improve both the website and myself with time.
I have changed the representation of the name to make it more readable.
I've created dating apps and I learned the market is totally won by a few big companies. I could never overcome the chicken & egg problem. Not knowing anything about your project, I would have to honestly say the 80k people on there is probably a frivolous claim. You may have scraped some other site and put that many bogus profiles on there.
I suppose any other dating sites that break through will be based on extremely simple ideas with elegant or new user interfaces. For example, How About We is an extremely simple idea. The concept of dating friends of friends was already tried several times. The last time I heard of it it was being done by circl.es. I would suggest trying something that is really unique that nobody has ever heard of which would help you break out. I hate to say it but one of the other stories in the last year that was a break out story was Ms. Travel. Try to package what you're doing in a really crazy way. I hacked together a crazy photosheet interface that I've never seen before and it just wouldn't catch. Trying to think of any other thing I could think of which nobody has done, I tried the idea of online dating via the unix command line. That did get me some exposure but certainly not enough to get the wheels of traction turning.
For what it's worth, here's a story that came out on Jezebel.com about my project at the time (which I shut off after a couple of weeks after this article came out).
I did not mean to offend you. I am saying 80k users are in the network. That does not mean 80k people registered. Its a "friend of friend" website. So, your degree 2 is also reachable. So, with 200 registrations, my network is 80k users. I am sorry if I misled you.
Once you login, you will see that there are a lot of potential dates for you, if you have even 2 friends on tomonotomo. That's the beauty of the website, imho.
The intent was never to cheat you. Since apologies if I got you offended.
We tried to launch pretty much the same concept a few years ago (dating through friends of friends on Facebook) but it didn't work out. It was called 'Trustcircle' and we still own the domain (www.trustcircle.com) in case you are interested in buying it! It might be a better option than tomonotomo! Just sayin' :)
I was working at a Parisian dating startup about two or three years ago, we had that friends of friends kind of vibe (it was actually called that) and it didn't prevent us from failing.
More men than women on those websites, the few women you get don't engage anyone for some reason so you usually end up having to buy cheap leads on silly marketing platforms and fake all the figures (men/women ratio, number of users, etc). Good luck though.
So, so many reasons, too many to comprehensively cover, but I'll try:
- The 80/20 rule. 80% of the messages go to 20% of the users, usually be attractiveness. This is true for both genders, but since Western society in general has men pursuing women, this means the most attractive women get tons of messages, while even the most attractive men get a smattering in comparison.
- This causes an overwhelming number of messages to flood into one segment of your population, causing them to stop using the service. Far from having their pick of the litter, their inbox simply fills. It's literally more messages than they have time to read. The most attractive segment of your population shuts down.
- In this environment, with no gatekeeping, spam-filtering, or any such mechanism, the optimal male strategy is to spam, and spam a lot. So they do, this is why you see a lot of "hey horny wanna fuck" - because it's really not worth spending more effort on a message that's going into a black hole anyways. This is also why you see a lot of copy/pasting, as well as a lot of "internet trapeze artists" - guys who have some schtick of a message they send over and over again (see: profiles where someone pretends to be a deranged killer, an anthropomorphic cat, or whatever insanity gets them noticed). Signal to noise ratio drops through the floor.
- To make an analogy to the greater web. This is like online advertising. There are so many ads out there that you're not going to click on anyways that the optimal strategy isn't to create well-produced advertisements, it's to shove popups and popunders at your browser so fast until finally scoring a click (either by accident or otherwise).
Feature requests: mutual references, ID checking. See couchsurfing.org for how they implement friends, references, and ID checks. Adds extra degrees of trust.
Another feature request: easy scheduling of events, so as a "first date" you could meet the person along with your mutual friends to help break the ice. I find the traditional 1-on-1 date puts a lot of pressure on people to perform well, vs getting to know each other in a relaxed social setting. I would keep these events private so they're only viewable by the immediate friend matrix, though.
Like dating a co-worker, I would never date someone who is a friend of a friend or a relative. This and the fact need a Facebook account makes Tomonotomo useless for me.
Is it just me or does the site design look cheesy?
This whole thing is pointless because it doesn't do anything useful. There is literally no difference between using the website or simply asking your friends if they know anyone you might hit it off with, and in Facebook's case, there are plenty of superfluous "friends" people have who may actually be terrible people. They allege "social pressure" in these cases, but on the whole it's a stupid term that generally doesn't mean anything.
OkCupid is still the pinnacle of online dating and probably will be for a long time, because the whole point of dating is that you actually go out with someone and see if you hit it off. Just because someone is a friend of a friend doesn't mean they're any better or different than Random Person A, and if anything, you're greatly limiting your pool of options. And lastly, if you're having trouble meeting someone and don't live in the sticks, the problem is likely you.
I tried a few sites in my day and I'd have to agree that OKC is the best I've tried, even if I didn't have luck with it. It was the most pleasing to use and it seemed like the people were of quality.
I'd like to see a site where an algorithm is used to match interests only, if you match there, then photos can be viewed...or maybe not, but at least rely heavily on the interest metric. Maybe a site for intellectual-leaning people (or however one would want to word that) would also do well, or one that relies on Myers-Briggs (though I know that's not for everyone).
Good luck with the idea and I believe there's market for that. It will definitely help a certain category of people. But some other people will quickly say they don't like it because they don't want to date friends of their friends. It all depends on the particular person.
I am sorry to disappoint you. Its a social dating website. It has to be built on facebook.
You do not share anything that is not required. We do not post anything on your wall. Facebook login is just to understand your network. I hope you will trust us, and become our user. Thanks
That's a job recruitment app based on the notion that someone in a job can't publicly announce that they are seeking a new job, and so their network advertises their availability anonymously.
That trick though, of getting people who know, to be the one to recommend someone... would work perfectly well with dating.
Sounds familiar. Is it by any chance created by the same guys with whom Paul Graham and Harj Taggar made public office hours at Startup School 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9m9vPAlb_0 [the intended part starts at 25:05]?
Despite the critical reviews here, you've built something that seems to be attracting users. How long has the site been online, and if that user-count on your homepage is legitimate - what methods have you used to attract your first 100,000 users?
I think it would help a lot if the 'no' in Tomonotomo were accentuated with a different colour or so. Then it would be easier to see that it are in fact 3 (Japanese) words strung together. I think that would make it a lot better to remember.
This is practically the reason why I turned off to show my FB friends: Acquaintances going through my friend list, and writing random messages to good-looking ones.
The color scheme is ugly. I like the gradual change over the name on mouseover but purple to yellow through brown is not the most appealing... That being said the layout is good.
I'm not sure I understand the value. Friends of friends are the easiest people to meet / hookup with already. The purpose of online dating sites is to meet strangers you don't already have an in with. Is there really a problem there that needs solving?
The passive cute / not cute thing sounds interesting. Maybe make that the focus? That's something that isn't already built into Facebook and would definitely solve the problem of some awkwardness.