HotOrNot.com began as a site for rating the attractiveness of random strangers’ pictures.  But recently they’ve introduced a new Meet People service which offers some new possible directions for online dating.

In short, the service works like this:  You can browse people by gender, location, age, and keyword.  Each profile has photos, a short intro (250 characters or less), a list of keywords to describe themselves and their interests, and a HotList (which is really just another keyword list accompanied by images).  The top of each profile includes a simple question: “Do you want to meet him/her?”  If you click Yes, the other person gets notified that they have a new “half match”.  If they visit your profile and do the same, you two are now “double matches”.  You can’t send a message to someone until you are double-matched with them.

I see advantages and disadvantages to this approach but overall I was intrigued by the unique features they offer:

1. Allowing messages from only people you like: I think women will especially like this because they can avoid getting messages from creeps and weird strangers.  On the other hand, it prevents someone from trying to impress someone they like via a personal message, forcing them to rely on each other’s profile to determine how worthy they are.
2. Replacing detailed profile information with keywords: This makes the profile much easier to fill out and less rigid than what you’d normally find on a dating site.  On the other hand, having predefined questions can help focus the users to enter the most applicable information.  Also, HotOrNot unfortunately does not help the user avoid misspellings or uncommon variations.
3. “Flowing” search results: I’ve always thought that the traditional list of search results that dating sites offer cheapen the idea of dating.  When you meet someone in real life you aren’t picking them from a list.  It gives less focus on individuals than you have in real life comings and goings.  HotOrNot uses the same flow of search results they use for their standard rating service — presenting one profile at a time with previews for the next 4 upcoming results.

Whether or not these are useful features is debatable, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, but there is one disadvantage to using their site:  there seem to be technical issues with their half-matching feature.  During the time I had an active profile on their site I received around a dozen email notifications stating I had new half matches, but after logging in I was told I had none.  I sent a few messages to their tech support asking, what happened?  Is there a bug with their site preventing them from being displayed?  Or were the emails incorrectly sent to me?  Unfortunately I NEVER heard a response.  I know…how rude!  So whether it’s a technical problem or a miscommunication of how the feature works, it’s obvious they need to do some more work.  And they could start by being more responsive to their users.