TheDate HornyMatches

AmericanSingles.com has been on the scene since Internet dating began. The parent company Matchnet PLC, manages several sites around the world with the two biggest being AmericanSingles (North America) and jdate, a Jewish ethnic site with combined paid subscribers over 170,000.

AmericanSingles.com has members from 230 countries, in fact they own several Matchnet sites in UK, AU, DE as well as a gay site Glimpse and adolescent site called College luv. so if you live outside of the us, you can still use AmericanSingles.com - which seems a little strange to me, but hey, if it works for you!

It’s free to create your profile, post photos and search for members. You can create a profile, search and flirt all at no charge allowing the user to compile limited interest from potential matches.

If you want to email or chat with someone you have to pay, just like on the other sites, there is no free lunch here, not even for women. To get full access to all of the AmericanSingles.com communication tools, you can upgrade to an AmericanSingles Premium package. Creating a profile is easy with the questions centered on typical issues of age, location, interests and qualities desired in a match. The whole process takes initially about 12 minutes and can constantly be refined and updated. The profile can have up to 4 photos.

They also offer access to articles on dating and romance.

This is really three sites in one, kind of like Lavalife where you have three areas: Dating, Adult and Alternative - Domination, Bondage and Sado-Masochism

When you’re setting up your profile you can choose if you want your profile posted on one or all of there different sites. You can choose Dating: where you can find a pen-pal, friend, date or more. Adult is for pure sex, swingers, group sex and discreet encounters. Finally there is the Alternative area where people who are into Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism hang out. I did find one thing odd about the profile set-up. It appears, if you join the dating site, your ad is automatically posted in the Adult and Alternative section as well. You must click on the “Hide Profile” button in the edit Adult and Alternative section if you don’t want it listed.

I’m not really into the Adult or Bondage scene, so to be totally honest with you, as I was filling out my profile I felt like I was in New Orleans, walking to my favorite Jazz club and feeling a bit uncomfortable as I walked past all the strip joints. IwantU.com has something for everyone… I guess.

As you fill out the profile you can tell the system it how often you want your matches emailed to you. They call this automatic process their Aphrodite, which in Greek mythology, means Goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture.

IwantU.com has a popularity voting system, ala “Are you hot or not” where other members can vote for your profile. You can also be paged or text messaged when you have email waiting for you in their built-in email system, so you don’t have to login just to see if you have email waiting. The site also supports Hot List and Ignore Lists to make it easier to organize your contacts. You have the ability to post your own photo albums, each album can hold 32 pictures each and you can have 10 albums or galleries. You can also post a voice greeting so people can hear the sound of your voice.

So, I filled out my profile and started on my journey to find a date for the weekend and to my surprise, you are not even allowed to read a person’s profile if you’re not a member. The site makes you purchase tokens in order to do just about anything. So, if you’re too cheap to spend $24.95 on the chance you might meet someone, skip this site.

I purchased my 4,000 tokens for $24.95 and started off by browsing the dating site for thirty-something women in Southern California. Like most sites, most of the profiles do not have pictures attached, so I find it difficult to view the quality of the members.

I will tell you, this site, in my honest opinion, is really a adult playground. Look at it this way, it has three rooms: dating and romance, adult and adult alternative. So 2/3rd of the activity is about Adult Play. So if that is what you’re looking for, this is the place. The site has a lot of extra features they place in their “Cafe”. The Cafe has “Chat Rooms” where you can join in group discussions. The rooms with the most activity appear to be more explicit (xxx) - The Bar (Looking for a one night stand), Motel Suite (Relationships, Dating, Foreplay, Sex and Kama Sutra) and the Red Room (No moderation, pure sex talk). Yes, they have other rooms, more PG13 or R rated, but it I never see anyone in them.

They have Live Cams, where members can broadcast their web camera to anyone who wants to view it, while a group chat room is active. So you see pictures and people typing things like “take it off” and “move your hand here or there” I don’t think I need to say more, do I?

They have moderated and non-moderated Message Forums, where people post all types of questions asking for advice. The non-moderated rooms appear to get about 10x the postings. To give you an idea of the types of postings you’ll find, the most popular topic in the sex forum (which has the most postings) was a response to the question, “Where’s the wildest place you’ve had sex?” I think it’s always interesting to compare notes and see what other people think, especially when it comes to sex. I couldn’t help but notice it appears the men post about 5 messages to every message posted by women.

From the Cafe you can send Post cards to people. All types of post cards, get well, thanks, birthday, holidays, love friendship, erotic, etc… It’s a cute idea, I’m not sure I would send my girlfriend (if I had a steady) a valentine’s day card from this site. I did send a Erotic card to Barbie as a joke, so it did serve a purpose for me.

Another interesting feature in the Cafe is their Party Posting message board. Here members can post invitations for people to attend a “get together” based on the location where they live. Most of the parties are on the East Coast. Most of these parties are just a couple of people trying to hook up for an orgy.

From the Cafe you can also set up your account to receive matches via email. You can also view the Top 100 IWantU.com profiles. I think this is a cool idea, I just wish they included additional information on the screen when showing the photo. It would be useful to see their age, location and what they’re seeking (friend, dating, etc…) Generally speaking, they don’t excel in the layout of their HTML.

They also allow you to play games from the Cafe, however none of the games were Multi-player, so I really don’t get the point.

As I moved around the site, I really came to the conclusion this is an adult dating site. The dating and romance “section” has a lot of nice people, with sincere dating goals in mind, it’s just at every page on the site there was a link to view adult content. For example, when browsing the top women dating profiles, I was just one click away to see the top women profiles in the Adult section. This is the perfect dating site for open minded adults.

Lavalife.com is a combination online dating with a more promiscuous attitude. This is the perfect site for people who are interested in “hooking up”. I’m sure I’m like most of the guys, I posted a picture and profile in the dating and relationship sections, but kept checking out the women in the Intimate Encounters. What can I say

Lavalife.com offers the user the choice of three similar but unique communities of Dating, Relationships and Intimate Encounters. In fact one can post individual profiles for each or all communities varying or hiding information based upon the willingness to share in that community. The site offers a pictorial studio with degrees of visibility and safety as to who can see what and when. They also offer as part of the personal profile a hot list which allows the subscriber to save the names of their favorite potential matches.

The most interesting aspect of the Lavalife site is that it does not charge a subscriber fee per month, but acts as a transactional pay as you go model where you make a deposit and use that amount depending upon how many people you contact. Think of this site as a combination Friendfinder and Adult Freindfinder all rolled into one!

It was interesting to see the number of women who, while in chat, asked me if I had a problem in the IE room. I got the feeling the community of women on Lavalife we’re not as uptight as some of the women on other sites.

This site is all about flirting. Whispers are Instant messages, Smiles are like icebreakers or winks and they even have video chat enabled.

This is not a review so much as a story. I was having coffee at Starbucks with my girl friend Nikki a couple of weeks ago when she told me she was tired of being alone every Friday and Saturday night. I told her she should give internet dating a try. Nikki is a gorgeous 38 year old brunette who is a successful real estate broker in Southern California. She has focused the last 15 years of her life building her business and none of the men she’s met have been able to keep her attention. Nikki has outgrown the bar scene, and most of the social circles she runs have a very low bachelor count. As we visited over coffee, she told me she still was hopeful her one true love was out there, but she knew the clock was ticking.

Nikki works with the southern California elite (attorneys, doctors, CEO, top athletes, and several Hollywood stars). Nikki is their go-to girl when they want to buy and sell property because she’s as smart as she is beautiful. She is driven, focused and knows how to work a room better than anyone I’ve ever met. But she is single, never married and lonely. She wanted my advice.

Somehow MyCountryMatch.com, one of my favorite sites just didn’t seem like an option. Nikki doesn’t want her picture available for the whole world to see. She’s worried about the negative gossip that can travel in her circles. It isn’t that she can’t attract a guy, she just can’t find the right guy who shares her same views on family, children and marriage.

So, I suggested she try Great Expectations. This is a different type of dating site where each and every member is screened. You make an appointment via their website, then go into one of their local offices around the country. Service is very personalized and it’s totally confidential.

Nikki took me up on my advice. She made an appointment at the Irvine, California office of Great Expectations. She was met by one of their counselors where they had her fill out a complete questionnaire about herself and what she was looking for. They also create a 3-4 minute video profile and took updated photos.

All of this information is posted on their private, members only website. The nice thing about Great Expectations is not only do they screen every member, they also run complete background checks on each member. So Nikki didn’t have to worry about guys who lie about being married, or about where they live or the type of jobs they have. This is clearly a solution designed for people like Nikki. Personalized service, extremely safe and confidential. In talking with her today, she told me Great Expectations has helped her get her foot back into the dating scene, meeting other single, career professionals who share interests similar to hers.

It doesn’t cost anything to visit the site, fill out the form and wait for them to contact you. They have different pricing plans and I promised Nikki I wouldn’t say how much she spent. I gave them a middle of the road rating because of the cost and limited membership. I think for Nikki it is the best choice, but it isn’t for everyone.

I learned of emode’s existence when a friend sent me a IQ test hosted by emode.com - they have a jillion fun tests for checking everything from your IQ to what your fav color means to what kind of cat are you; I happened to notice they had a dating site as well, so I tried it.

For free you can search other profiles, but you must pay to actually have contact with anyone. Which these days is standard, I think. You fill out a rather lengthy profile after you take your ‘personality’ test, and are then free to surf the profiles all you want. The problem is, too much of what matches one person to another is based on answers the user is much too free to make up, and you end up being attracted to a profile which is more of how the person wants to be viewed, rather than an objective summary of the person’s personality.

I met and went out with 9 women from emode. All were high percentage matches to me, 95% or better. All but one totally misrepresented themselves. One even turned out to be a lesbian who was trying to experiment. Another was an ex-heroin addict from the streets who had been institutionalized, who ended up stalking me. I wouldn’t sit on this one side of my living room for a month for fear of a car coming crashing through from the street to kill me. In fairness, I did meet one woman that I still love to this day. Is 1 out of 9 good or bad?