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Complete guide to online dating, personals sites and matchmaking services on the web. |
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Review of Yahoo Personals!
Home Page: personals.yahoo.com
Overall
If Match.com is the biggest, Yahoo! Personals is probably the most visited personals site on the web, thanks to the popularity of Yahoo!. Since switching from free to a pay site, the service has improved immeasurably, and so has the quality of the profiles. Once known for high numbers of spam profiles, Yahoo has become a safe and reliable (and inexpensive) way to meet singles.
Features
If you are using one of the other Yahoo! services, such as email or Yahoo! Messenger, you are basically already a member of Yahoo! Personals. You can just sign in and start creating your profile. If you are a new member, signing up for Personals will also give you access to many other Yahoo features such as games, free email account, chat etc.
The site is simple, well designed and easy to use as you might expect from Yahoo!. After you create your free profile, you can upload up to 5 photos. Yahoo! is pretty strict about enforcing the guidelines about profanity and adult pictures, so your profile will quickly dissapear if it contains any of those.
If you are taking cautious first steps, you can make your profile invisible ands how it only to people you choose. However if you want a lot of replies, you'll probably need to make it searchable.
In addition to posting a profile and pictures, free members can post a video or voice greeting and reply to messages, but cannot initiate email contact or chat via Yahoo Messenger until they subscribe.
You need to login to Yahoo Personals to read your messages and replies. Most other sites will simply forward emails to your regular email address and I expected this to be an annoyance. However, having used it, I have to admit that it is a better way of organizing your contacts. You get your own mailbox where all the outgoing and incomming messages are saved. Along with each message, there is a picture of the member who sent it, some basic information, such as age and location, as well as a link to their profile, and a usefull reminder of whether you replied or not. You can sort messages in many ways, ignore particular members, or flag them as favorites etc.
Pricing
One month for $19.95 Three months for $42.95 (Less than $15/month) 12 months for $89.95 (Less than $8/month!)
Pros
Huge member database. Safe and reliable. Well designed, easy to use site. Cheap.
Cons
With popularity comes an increase in number of spam profiles and messages which is still somewhat higher than on other top personals sites.
Verdict
With millions of members, and even more millions browsing the profiles every day, Yahoo! Personals is a way to get noticed and make a lot of contacts fast. Coming from a big company like Yahoo!, you know that your personal information is kept safe and private. To top it all off, it is one of the cheapest personals sites, starting from only $8 a month. Highly recommended.
Home Page: personals.yahoo.com
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