We’ve been quiet on the blog, but very busy working on CupidWithFriends and addressing feedback users have been sending us.
Over the past 2 weeks, we’ve seen the number of profiles on the site jump from 7,000 to 60,000. It’s clear that we’ve struck a chord with frustrated online daters, and we’re excited to be pushing online dating in the direction of being more social, which drastically improves the experience.
Here are some of the major changes we’ve made over the past 2 weeks:
Major UI changes: A new logo, navigation, and color scheme. Much easier on the eyes.
A completely redesigned home page to address privacy concerns: We wrote up a No Spam policy after some users expressed feeling uncomfortable connecting with Facebook. Rest assured, we’re not pulling a Zynga Farmville here. We will never spam your wall, activity feed, or friends. We take your privacy very seriously and will never abuse the trust you’re placing in us.
View the new home page on Dribbble
Ability to delete and flag comments: Because of the nature of you not being able to control your profile, we realize that some comments written you may want to delete if they’re not flattering. We think you should leave interesting comments since those are great conversational starters, but you can now delete any comments on your own profile. You may also flag comments on other profiles if they’re inappropriate or don’t belong.
Easier questions to answer on profiles: Our old questions were a bit difficult to answer, so we’ve added some lighter, easier questions. When writing comments, it’s best to write something that would capture a viewer’s attention and leave out enough detail that they’d want to know more about it.
New questions:
140 character limit added on all profile comments: We’re all texting on our phones, so this should feel pretty natural for both profiles and having conversations. I realized that when I would use other dating apps, I’d get the girl’s phone number and text back and forth a little bit before meeting up. This turns out to work better than the long OkCupid messages that were taking up too much time and can’t be done on a phone. This is going to be important, especially when we release our mobile app.. Oops, did I just hint at that?
OkCupid importer: A lot of our users are joining us from OkCupid. You can now easily import your data into CupidWithFriends when you visit your own profile page. This adds the “What I’m looking for" question to your profile, and we’ll soon pull in the questions.
Ability to update your profile photo from Facebook: A lot of our users support marriage equality, and they joined when their Facebook profile picture was a red image. To update your profile picture from Facebook, hover over your picture and click “Update from Facebook."
Account Settings page: Allows you to change your e-mail, profile URL (cupidwithfriends.com/profile/your_name), and current location. Lets you control e-mail notifications and change your account type to Matchmaker. More information below.
People in relationships can be Matchmakers for their single friends: Matchmakers have special privileges on the site. Normally, users must have friends commenting on their profile before they can browse other profiles. Matchmakers can see all users, but can only make introductions for their friends. They cannot directly message people on the site. They also won’t show up in search results.
All users migrated to single status, manual opt-in to Matchmaker status required: When we launched, we asked people to setup profiles for their single friends. We’re shifting the focus to your own profile and less on your friends’. We added a distinct account type called Matchmaker, but you must manually opt-in by going to your Account Settings page, clicking the “Account" tab. Your relationship status must be either “In a relationship" or “Married" on Facebook before your status can be changed. You won’t be able to switch back to single status for 2 weeks after doing this.
Reactions to comments: You can now mark comments as funny, cool, WTF, or intriguing. We hope this will help the best comments rise to the top and be the most visible.
Activity feed: You can now see what activity is happening around you. This includes comments, photos added, and reactions to comments.
Reciprocal Browsing and Filters: When setting up a new account, you can only see profiles with the equivalent amount of information. If you have 3 friends who commented, you can see other profiles that have 3 friends who commented or fewer. Once you’ve reached 5 friends who commented and you have 5 photos, you can see everyone on the site (including those with more information than you). You can filter searches by: distance, gender, location.
Visibility ranking and how to improve it: We have added the ability to see how visible you are from the browse page, and offer recommendations on improving it. The best way to improve your visibility is to have friends comment on your profile, add photos, comment on friends’ profiles, and indicate what you’re looking for (either by importing OkCupid data, or by manually filling it out). The profiles with the most comments, friends, and photos will always be displayed near the top.
Privacy Page to block friends: If you want to prevent certain friends from commenting or seeing your profile, you can block them on the Privacy page. You can access this by hovering over your profile picture in the top right, and selecting “Privacy" from the dropdown menu.
Allowing a web site access to your Facebook data is a very special privilege, and one you shouldn’t freely give away. This is why we’re adding some explanation as to what you can use CupidWithFriends for.
If you haven’t yet, you can read our No Spam policy and how we use Facebook permissions. CupidWithFriends was started out of the frustration with online dating, and we take your privacy very seriously. We don’t want to jeopardize the trust we build with you.
Below, we’ve included some screenshots to show some of the functionality of CupidWithFriends so you can better understand how it works. These will be updated as we continue to make changes to the product.
Create profiles for friends and commenting on them
Add comments and photos to your friends’ profile, or invite other friends to help fill it out
Browse profiles of people:
View individual profiles
Think they’re a match? Introduce one of your friends to them. Your friend won’t find out unless they respond.
Our No Spam Policy is our promise to you that we won’t abuse the trust implied by connecting with your Facebook account.
You can take a quick tour of CupidWithFriends to see how it works if you haven’t done that yet.
Here’s our No Spam Policy:
Here are the ways we use Facebook to create the best possible experience for you:
These are things we will not do with your Facebook friends: