Online Dating Made Easy!

WHAT WE FOUND: LargeFriends is a fun service for people that are looking for Big Beautiful Women or Big Beautiful Men to meet and possibly date. We like small services like this that make online dating fun. We tried the free member package and once you’ve signed up you have a lot of features to use that include replying to messages you receive, sending ‘winks’ to people you are interested in meeting and using the Instant Messenger to chat with other online members. Email messages are sent anonymously to the email address you joined with, so be sure it’s a private email address. When you find someone you want to contact first, before they contact you, you’ll need to upgrade to a gold membership. The upgraded membership also allows for more features that the basic free membership including top listing in search results ahead of the free member profiles and being able to see who has viewed your profile and who has placed you in their “I’m interested” section.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Easy profile form, free to join and reply to messages, send ‘winks’ to other members. Instant Messenger, anonymous emailing direct to your signup email address, member forum.

WHAT WE FOUND: Signing up is fast and easy, only two basic pages of limited information is asked, takes about 2 minutes to complete. Choose one or both of the dating sections “Dating Relationship” and “Intimate” profiles to be completed. Based on your selection of the sex of person you want to meet your profile will be available to like-minded members (straight or gay). When uploading your picture you also have the option to choose whether your picture is public, anyone can see it, or private, you have to give the person permission first; to allow Lavalife to use your public information and picture in their advertising. Choose “Yes, promote me now!” if you are willing. Once you’re a member you can view and search for people to contact, complete your profile with more information about you, including a voice message, videos and adding more pictures...

Read our complete review here...

WHAT WE FOUND: LetsMeetUp is an online video community that is great for people that own a webcam and want to meet other singles through video profiles and for people that want to see more than just a picture. Currently LetsMeetUp is free to join, post your profile and contact other members, so join now because soon it will be changed to a paid membership. (No date is available for this change.) The profile form is basic and will only take a minute to complete, the real fun here is the video profiles that are available. Be sure you have a webcam ready to place your own video ad or join the competitions to win one. Creating your video profile is easy but does require a software download (automatically installed, don’t worry about being a technical person). “The Lounge” is an online magazine that has plenty of fun articles, advice, contests and things to do. Searches are fast and browsing the profiles is easy to do and quick to find the type of profiles you’re interested in. They really made a site worth hanging out at when they decided on the features to be made available at LetsMeetUp. (Note: Internet Explorer is required to access the features of this service, other browsers are not currently supported.)

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Currently free to join (may change soon to paid memberships), post your profile and contact other members. Chat room and online magazine. Be sure to have a webcam ready to create your video profile.

WHAT WE FOUND: Love.org is one of the easiest to use services we’ve reviewed. Currently free to join, place your personal ad and send and receive messages, we recommend that you complete a quick search of your local area before you join. That will usually convince you that there are people in your area, or with the attributes that you find attractive, that you want to meet. The search is geared for members from America and Canada since these members can search by zip code to localize their results. Other countries match by the country. You can also narrow the results by a person’s appearance, including tattoos, body piercings, hair and eye color, etc. When joining you will be emailed your account information so be sure to double check your email address. The profile form is quite easy to answer, includes room for up to 5 pictures, and uses your answers to questions that will be incorporated into sentences to avoid the checklist look that many other services use but with 8 essay questions you may want to keep your profile invisible until you’ve fully completed it. We really like the “Interest Meter” feature that allows you to automatically place someone in your hot list or interest list as you view their profile. Messages are sent anonymously through the Love.org system to your member message center. You have to login to check for messages. Use the agent feature to have profiles searched automatically and match notifications emailed to you as new members join. The free membership allows for up to 10 messages a day per member and you can become a gold member and have unlimited message capability for a fee.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to place your personal ad and picture, currently free to send and receive 10 messages per day or become a gold member for unlimited messaging. Straight and same sex personals

WHAT WE FOUND: Just start by joining up. The free part starts as soon as you complete a short form for your username and password and for others to be able to find you. Then you can start searching for a date or add more information to your profile, upload your picture, really take a look around. Of course you can just go and look around, the search is there even if you aren’t a member yet. Head over to the chat rooms and see who’s talking! It’s free to make contact so go and have some fun! You can check for new messages and the messages you’ve sent out at your email page.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free service when you join and free to make contact. Add your picture to your profile, join the chats, search the profiles. Straight, same-sex and swinger ads available.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: 100% free for straight singles in the U.S. Profiles are basic and easy to read. Only options for interaction are rating profiles and sending messages. Basic searches with optional add on criteria. MatePal also provides a statistics section of their site and a section to rate random photos of other members.

WHAT WE FOUND: Meet Your Greens is a new service for the people that care about other living things, besides people, and aim for a higher degree of understanding of our environment through lifestyle choices (meditation, spiritualism, dietary choices). Join for the free trial and (at the time of this review) you will receive a full access 6 month free trial and also be rewarded with 6 gift vouchers worth a free month full access membership to share this service with other singles that you know. Allow about 5 minutes to complete the profile questionnaire and to add up to 3 pictures of yourself with your profile, then go forth and begin browsing/searching the service. Since this is a very new service, your profile will receive a lot of visits and you should also be ready to reply to a lot of messages.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Member only personals for “green people”. Currently, full access is free for 6 months. Pictures can be included with your profile. Large amount of links to related environmental and lifestyle web sites. New features scheduled to be introduced soon. Straight and same sex personals available here.

WHAT WE FOUND: When Joe and Marg (the creators and owners of Megafriends) moved to a new city, they found it hard to meet new friends because they don't go to bars and they work at home. So they created a place where people can come together and meet, for friendship, someone to travel with, as penpals and even for getting together and dating. You will find it easy to browse the personals, by state in America (the most ads are placed by Americans), by province in Canada and by country for the rest of the world. Searching includes the options of education level, body type, language spoken and even type of relationship you want (including "secret affair!). When browsing or searching the personals you will be able to only read the basic comments and view a photo if available. You must become a member, for free, to see the complete ad and to place your own at Megafriends, to use one of the 5 chat rooms, and be able to send a limited number of messages to other members. You will also be able to receive email messages from Megafriends when a compatible new member signs up, so you can be the first to send them a message! You'll want to become a Gold member to reply to messages, have your personal ad located at the top of the listings, and be able to include your instant messenger information included with your ad. Over all, this is a friendly service, easy to get around, and a lot of ads available for Americans.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to post your personal ad, free to send messages, become a member to reply. Plenty of activities including forums, games and chat rooms. Straight, same sex, and secret affair personal ads available here.

WHAT WE FOUND: The MySpace community, one of the largest social networking services, provides the tools you need to easily create your blog and connect to friends, family and meet people. Keeping it simple and usable MySpace allows you to start a blog by joining quickly with a simple signup page, then allows you to answer additional questions to complete your personal profile. Help is at the ready by the admin “Tom” so you’re always just a click away for help in customizing your space. The blog features additional space to talk about your daily life, news, whatever is on your mind. You can keep your profile private or make it available for everyone to visit. Adding pictures that you want to share, adding music files that are made available to everyone, and videos, allows you to complete your likes and moods as you update and grow your blog. Easy to search for other bloggers of similar tastes you’ll connect fast here. Join groups, watch videos, most music and entertainment people have a MySpace account so you can add them to your friends easily to round out your blog and tastes. We do have to add this caveat: there isn’t much policing of the blogs and profiles of members by the MySpace staff and there are some real freaks as members, so I’d recommend keeping your profile and blog private until you feel comfortable revealing yourself.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to join and use all features. You’ll easily make your space your own through the custom features available, add music, photos and videos to share (non-copyright material only). Features are easy to learn and use.

Read our complete review here.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: 100% free for women but to allow free replies to your emails and get better search results you must pay for membership. Only other option besides chatting is Search. Profiles are set up easily and nicely viewable. The site is easy to navigate through.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: A great way to get connected to peers, friends and friends of friends. You'll love logging in, watching your network grow, searching and browsing other members that are connected to you. Free to join, contact others, but you have to be invited first by another member.

CHANGES WE'D LIKE TO SEE: (Suggested February 2004) A tour explaining the features. We found it hard to navigate without better instructions as to what to do next after completing the profile pages.

WHAT WE FOUND: A great free service with a lot of features. You have to join to look around, so think up a user name, answer a few questions and you can even add your Pagoo, ICQ and Instant messenger numbers for others to contact you. I recommend ICQ and opening a new identity so that your OtherSingles friends are separate from your regular ICQ buddies. The sign-up should take only a couple of minutes and you can edit it later too. Now begin with a search, you have all types of characteristics to choose in your search and even those with ICQ, Instant messenger or Pagoo listed you can find fast. You could be meeting someone right now! You must have your own photo added to your profile to be able to view anyone else's photo, so I hope you have one ready. You have lots of options at OtherSingles. And there are lots of things to do here as well. Have fun, join today! Just be sure to join with an anonymous email, like the Dateme email available at aLoveLinksPlus!

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free personals, chats, horoscopes, news areas, instant messages capability. Straight and same sex personals here.