Dating Service Reviews

Day 4
Lavalife has done a good job in holding my interest for the service. Not a lot of emails sent to me but the member’s profiles brought to my attention really stand out well.
Today I did receive an email from Lavalife telling me that someone has sent me a message, and they live quite close to me.

As of this date I have received 3 messages in the “Dating” category and three messages from members of the “Relationship” category. All from members far away by more than 1000 kms except one (within 200 kms).

I also received an email from Lavalife explaining to me that members with photos posted receive up to 8x more views and messages that members that do not post a photo and that sounds about right, no photo, very little interest in your profile. And included with the email is a bonus offer of 50% off a 6 month membership.

The Lavalife2mobile feature, which I saw advertised on the site today, looks like a great bargain at about 5 dollars a month, (on top of your regular monthly subscription). Who wouldn’t want to know about singles directly in their area, conveniently on their phone?

I do like the “Viewed me” feature, it’s a bit exciting to see who has seen your profile so you can go and look at their profile.

So far so good with Lavalife.

Day 3

Lavalife members have sent me 3 messages so far today. Unfortunately none are within a 1,000 km of where I live and I’m really not into the whole “long distance” thing. But the email that followed a few hours later, the “This Week’s 9 Featured Gals”, had 9 women within 75km of me. Impressive, even though none of these women messaged me personally. (I wonder if any of them know me already?)

Time will tell.

I have done more exploring of the Lavalife site and found a few features that didn’t pop out at me before:

- Videos can be added to your profile. (Maybe like video voice mail?)

- My backstage, where I can add personal pictures and video and captions that is only accessible to the people I permit to see. This feature really works for me and it can be different for each section of Lavalife (Dating, Relationship and Intimate sections can have their own specific profiles).

- Member photo and video slide shows

and even an offer to try Lavalife by phone with a free trial code (sorry, my code won’t work for you,  join and get your own, LOL)

Lavalife is turning out to be quite a dating adventure only three days in.

Good job!

Day 2

I am surprised that with only the basics of my profile completed that I have received already 5 messages from women!

That’s more than Match.com sent me, although a Match member did make me her “favorite”.

One woman out of the five is about a three hour drive from me, the rest are quite far. A quick look at their profiles shows that they seem to be nice people.

Lavalife Member Home Page

Click on your “my mailbox” to see the messages that were sent to you, as well as from which dating community the members are in. The three dating communities are “Dating, Relationship and Intimate”.
Dating – to meet and have some fun, generally starting non-sexual. This is where you make friends.
Relationship – to meet for what will hopefully be a continued relationship, possibly leading to a serious dating commitment, maybe even marriage.
Intimate - when you want to meet people and have intimate fun, (sex) this is the placer to have your profile available.
Note: you can select which communities your profile is available in and you can even have a different profile in each community.

Your profile and picture (if you uploaded one) is automatically available in all three dating communities. Visit your profile page for each community by clicking on the “my profiles” link and deleting the profile you do not want to be available in any community.

On your home page all the features are so easily accessible that you’ll spend a few hours checking everything out. But time is a wasting, be sure to complete your profile beyond the basics needed for your free membership. Add a video maybe, add more pictures too.

This is FUN!

Day 1

Lavalife has always been one of my favorite dating services.
They continue to grow their service features and try hard to keep attracting new members.
I think that any dating service is only as good as the members they attract, because if they can’t find members you’re interested in meeting, it’s just a wasted effort all around, isn’t it?
That being said, Lavalife.com is a dating service that you should try, even if you only plan on being a free member and waiting for other members to send you a message (replies to messages are free!).

The initial signup and profile questions are completed quickly. Signup on the front page and complete one page of your profile to get started. Be sure to post a picture, that will keep you in the top part of the search results that people will see.
To get more people seeing your profile, in the style of dating you are interested in, complete the rest of your profile and select the dating communities that you want your profile available in.

Lavalife has recently remodeled the member pages, which is great. Your profile home page now has all of Lavalife’s features one click away. I really like this change.

I will ge into more depth of Lavalife’s features over the balance of this 7 day review.
But the question remains “How long before Lavalife removes my profile after I stop logging in? Search for user “RealChatGuy45″ (male) and let me know when you can’t find me any more

Lavalife is one of the oldest dating services in Canada.

Lavalife’s roots come from the telephone dating service started in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1980’s and grew from there. Although the online business does not do as well as the phone dating service, I would expect that difference to start to blur as Lavalife brings the two services together more and adds additional services that can grow as intermediaries if well planned, such as the new growth into speed dating.

I have noticed through previous reviews that old profiles stay for a while then fade out or are removed, but since I was not watching closely, anything could have happened over the years. So now, for this review, there will be a fresh profile posted and we will track to see when the profile has been removed, after the 7 day login period (which also includes profile edits to keep the profile “alive” for one full week).

Lavalife has always been a favorite dating destination for me. Plenty of ways to connect with others and replying to messages is always free.
This review, over 7 days then watched carefully to see when the stale profile is removed, should be telling.

I do expect to see many improvements since I last visited Lavalife, at the beginning of 2009. I know that they have made several site improvements to increases the overall user experience.

Join me on my review by joining for free here and then adding your comments to my review blog as you are inspired.