Ask HN: Please review my Twitter dating app ;) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my Twitter dating app ;)

potwps.com

34 pointsloquace38 comments

Hi all,

Several months back, I asked HN to review my Twitter dating startup, Plenty of Tweeps, and got loads of useful, and mostly positive feedback.

I have since put the site through a total redesign, significantly changed the way you signal interest in Twitter users, and implemented a payment model.

I would really appreciate your feedback on the new version of the site. Radical honesty welcome. ;)

Cheers,

Brad

It might be a good idea to add somewhere if signing up will make it obvious that you are a member.

(E.g. by signing up does it become obvious to everyone on Twitter that you are single? Just to other people who use the site? Just to people who are logged in? Can your membership be indexed by google?)

Also, almost everyone in your 'our users' list is male. That's probably representative but you might want to change it to display a 50:50 mix.

At the bottom you have a splash page showing what I assume are photos of your users.

Of the users with human photos, it's a sausage fest. This will scare away both men and women.

I suppose solving that problem is the holy grail of dating sites

It's a good point though. I can easily change the query to include a balance of male and female photos.

Also, remove default bird-silhouette pictures.

I clicked the @30sleeps username below the girl's image and I was redirected to a Twitter authorization request. That's a little shady IMHO. Now I'm not so sure about signing up.

What happens when I click the big signup button? E.g. will my girlfriend or somebody I know be able to see I clicked the button?

Are you planning to match people u according to things they like to talk about and who they follow?

I agree - I saw the avatars and think I should either be able to click through to the person's profile on your site or at least their Twitter account.

So I guess they can tweet while on their first date about how their date is going!

I couldn't easily find out how to search based on city + age. When you click on search you end up in "All Twitter Users Nearby" and since I didn't see that tab, I couldn't understand why I wasn't seeing any age information nearby and why it was showing me guys! Then I discovered the other tab and found out how to make a real search but really, why is the default tab the one that isn't really "search"? It's confusing to click on search and you don't see any place to enter search criterias. Other than that, I really like the design and how easy it is to sign up! Keep up the good work

Good point, thanks.

I've considered making the city + age search the default "Search" page, so your feedback may have helped me reach the tipping point. :)

Maybe you could also consider remembering the values you last selected in the search area. It seems to always come back to "Aged between 20 and 35" and those seem pretty arbitrary numbers

FWIW, you can set those here:

  http://plentyoftweeps.com/users/profile

Though it might be worth considering persisting whatever the last search terms used were...

It actually looks pretty good. The landing page really spells out what it's all about. I wouldn't use it personally since I don't think the overlap between "obsessive tweeters" and "girls I want to date" is large, but I'm not your target market.

How do you plan to contact people with this "Like" button though? I thought it was not, in general, possible to contact random twitter users unless they follow you? Also, isn't it slightly evil and spammy to contact users who haven't signed up for your service?

We currently notify unregistered users with an @ message on Twitter when someone likes their profile, or sends them a message or a smile. We only ever send one of these messages, and never again, if they don't join after that. (See http://twitter.com/PlentyOfTwps for examples.)

When the user is registered, we contact them via email.

Ah, well that's both technically feasible and non-evil then. Good stuff!

I wouldn't mind driving an hour to meet up with someone. A huge problem I run into with sites like OkCupid is that NYC is within that radius and I do not want to meet up with people from the city.

Living somewhere with subways is a completely different lifestyle. For instance, not owning a car? Or the idea of the wilderness being central park?

I would love to be able to set a radius and blacklist matches based on city name (e.g. NYC, Manhattan, Brooklyn).

Clean design, I like it. I haven't used the service at all but I like the idea a lot and it certainly has potential. You could also do some interesting things with matchmaking based on the analysis of users' twitter streams. I've been flirting with a "Dating Genome" matchmaking application idea for a while, idea being, it would use data points from Twitter, Facebook, etc... to compile a group of users most likely to match your "genome".

Good job!

Thanks. :)

This looks pretty cool, certainly has a unique way of enticing users to join to seed the site (the biggest hurdle of any dating site).

At the top it says "@alicia_CHt met @30sleeps on Plenty of Tweeps", and then further down the page it mentions that @30sleeps is one of the two creators. Is this you? Did you really meet your girlfriend using your own app? That's pretty cool.

Yes I am @30sleeps, and yes I really met @alicia_CHt on Plenty of Tweeps. ;)

Neat concept. How many members do you have - do you publish that?

Second - how do members deal with privacy? It seems pretty wide-open in terms of exposing your personal life (eg: twitter, which probably links back to your personal name, etc.)...

I think you have a great idea here, I would probably join if I were single. One comment would be to get better screen-shots (not the best quality). Overall, one of those ideas where I think, "why didn't I think of this!" Good Luck!

One of the best landing pages I've seen launch here in a good long while. Nice job.

Thank you, those are kind words. :)

could you remove the users at the bottom of the page that have no photo?

Good call. There is some bugginess related to Twitter accounts being deleted, or Twitter nicknames being changed, and having that reflected on Plenty of Tweeps.

I'm looking into this, thanks!

Why not allow users to delete/deactivate their own accounts, especially on a dating site? Why should that require an email to you directly?

This is purely a question of what has so far been prioritized. There's a considerable amount of work involved in automating user deletion, but that feature is on the radar in the near future.

I like it. Clean design and to the point. Not into the dating scene so no domain specific advice from me.

The bug picture on the error page (which I got fairly frequently) is too scary!

Can those of us who don't use Twitter have a short abstract of your work?

Plenty of Tweeps is a dating site for Twitter users. The idea is that a person's Twitter activity stream provides a unique window into their life, something a little more authentic than a typical online dating profile.

You don't need to be a hardcore Twitter user to make use of the site though. Going through the signup process will help you create a Twitter account if you don't already have one, and allow you to easily find cool Twitter peeps in your area.

You can also upload photos and fill out a profile, which is particularly useful if you haven't tweeted much. :)

filter out the spam/porn, after a few minutes I saw many spam accounts, clean 'em out

Great name. Looks clean.

Thanks!

Ack! My first search showed an ex-girlfriend in the "Members nearby" section. Time to test the delete account function.

Sorry to hear that. If you want me to remove your account, just drop me a line here or at bradb@plentyoftweeps.com with your Twitter username.

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