My Single Friend Reviews

Editor's Star Ratings:

Chances of Getting a Date:
Features:
Quality / Size of Members' Photos:
Ease of Use / Navigation:
Ease of Joining / Registration:
Customer Support:
Value for Money:
Overall Star Rating:

Costs:

• Free for Basic membership.
• Upgrades are availalbe for Premium membership:
  • 1 Month:   GB £21
  • 3 Months: GB £38 (£12.66 per month)
  • 6 Months: GB £64 (£10.66 per month)

Features:

• Create your own profile and upload your pictures.
• Perform searches for other members within your local area.
• Browse other members' profiles, look at their pictures.
• Email other members using My Single Friend's internal e-mail system (premium members only).
• Block members from accessing your listing.  You can block them from e-mailing you too.
• Complete privacy protection - no one will know your identity unless you inform them!

Joining:

• Joining here is through a "Friend".  They must sign you up and complete a testimonial on your behalf.   This is explained in detail in the Editors Verdict  section.

Performing a Search:

• A full search facility is available, allowing members to search by:
  • gender
  • age range
  • sexual preference
  • location to within 10 miles of where you live
  • whether the member has pictures posted
  • ethnicity
  • smoking
  • drinking
  • employment type
  • education level
  • children
  • diet
  • height
  • body type

 

Editor's Verdict:

My Single Friend was founded by Sarah Beeny, a property developer best known for presenting the Channel 4 property shows Property Ladder, Streets Ahead and Britain’s Best Homes. After many years successfully "setting her friends up", she decided to open a website dedicated to friends helping other friends find suitable relationships.

Frankly,  when we first understood what this site's approach was we anticipated finding a struggling site with problems.  Our pre-conception was that people are too busy to go through all the legwork of signing up a friend and authoring a glowing testimonial.  We were quite wrong.  Real friends go out of their way to provide stellar testimonals!  As a result, this site is a bonafide winner with lots of activity and (we surmise) upwards of a million friends helping friends. It can be refreshing when a pre-conception is proven wrong.

The success of MySingleFriend is admirable. Their "no nonsense approach" and transparent policies, as they put it, plays a large part in the site's success.  In their own words, "We set up mysinglefriend.com because traditional dating sites did not offer the fun, the fair policies, the customer service and safety that online dating deserves". In short, they get it.  Many of the practices that some mainstream sites follow are (in our view) detrimental to the members' personal satisfaction and potential dating success.  We'll illustrate how MSF does it right.

Many sites intentionally retain all their free accounts (and even share them) to boost the appearance of higher member totals. As a result, those kinds of sites are loaded with dead memberships. In contrast, MySingleFriend remove inactive profiles from the site. They also make it easy for you to see how recently another member has logged in, through the use of a search parameter: last day, week , month or 2-3 months. This is an extremely useful feature as it allows you to see how keen a member is.

They also clearly state that they are a UK operation and don't accept  profiles from other locations.  They don't want your money if they can't serve you - a very fair-minded approach.  In fact, they are mindful of many of the kind of things that drive members crazy or, worse still, drive them away. 

MySingleFriend is a human-operated site.  All the profiles are "vetted" by people rather than machines and members concerns are efficiently handled by customer service people (not auto-generated replies). They boast a  95.4% customer satisfaction score.  That's quite an endorsement.

So, how well does this site run and serve the needs of their clientele. MySingleFriend claims over 100 couples per month.  That's very good especially if they really mean 'couples' and not just a couple of dates and it's been nice knowing you.   We'll grant them the benefit of the doubt  there.  

In our benchmark search (UK style) we had over 250 profiles presented.  We checked a number of them carefully to see that they really did meet our search criteria, which they did.   The Profile comprises the referring friend's testimonial page.  Some are  fairly lengthy essays while others are to the point and concise.  In either form they are wonderfully complimentary and actually quite enjoyable to read. There's enough personal infromation regarding habits and preferences to get a good idea of the member's likes and dislikes.  

Photo-wise we were and still are blown away. More than 85% of the members had photos, and not just the obligatory one.  Most have several images to see.  The quality of the pictures is superb as is the viewer software that permits a great enlargement feature to fully illustrate the photo handling quality here.  This is the best photo section we've seen, hands down. 

This really is a top notch UK dating site, with a large number of active members, all keen to date, and most having lots of excellent photos to feast your eyes on.

Being analytical animals, we must mention a few of the vagaries of note: Activities-wise MySingleFriend is not equipped with a chat room or an instant messenger. You need a Premium membership to make contact with other members through a well-protected privacy assured internal e-mail system.

However, you could argue that MySingleFriend are able to keep their rates reasonable by not loading the site up with electronic gadgets.  They realize that we have computers with instant messenger service already in place.

 We like to see on-site live communications to support  activities  and build community. Because of the way MySingleFriend operate, they have the involvement not only of the member, but of their friends too.  Think of the networking possibilities!  

My Single Friend have re-defined and expanded the concept of webdating with their novel idea, they have taken customer service to a new level and have become very successful as a result.

There are no special technical features at MySingleFriend.  They don't feel that you need them. They have the most special feature in full swing -  a caring site that is delivering an excellent user-experience. Check them out if your a UK resident,  or better yet, recommend a friend!

Click the button below to check out MySingleFriend.com for yourself...