KnottedLives

• Login procedure



The login procedure was very easy, just one page gathering the very general information to allow you onto their site. You have to option to fill out your profile during the login procedure or do it later on your leisure.




• Layout / Ease of use



For the most part eXerciseFriends is very easy to use. I have a couple of small problems with both the IM and chat features. For you to be able to use the messenger you need to add them to your favorites, this is not overly intuitive and could be spelled out better. Also, when you use the messenger’s manage feature to add to your favorites there is no way to get back to the main online/offline window. Because I use Firefox it automatically blocks popups and disrupts how the chat works. It is a very easy feature to disable in Firefox but maybe this issue and the IM issues should be referenced in the FAQs. I also have two issues with the layout of eXerciseFriends. Let me start with the positives. The search results are short and concise giving you enough
information to determine whether you want to bring up that persons profile or not and the search does not display too many of the return results on one page, very nice. The other features (excluding IM which opens in another window) display the information in a well formatted, easy to read manner. Now to my issues… The "My Home" page is very busy! They try to give you a lot of options to do on the home page as well as display as much information as possible (and ads but more on that later) but much of it is redundant. You can get to everywhere the home page links to from the tabs on top of the page. Speaking of, there may be better ways to group those tabs so they don’t look quite as congested. The second issue is that there is a ton of advertising everywhere. I realize that is how this site remains free and I am Big on free sites but maybe there can be a limit to the amount of ads all over the place. There are ads (usually multiple ads) on every page as well as all correspondence from eXerciseFriends. I know, my site also has ads. Call me the kettle.




• Activities



They have 111 activities to date. All of the activities are athletic/sports orientated which makes sense since they promote exercise. They also mention you can email the Webmaster with new activity suggestions. This would suggest that the number of activities will continue to grow.




• Features



The site has the two main features, search and email. They also have a few additional features, forums, messaging, chat, and groups, which I talk about in cool stuff. I’ll talk briefly about each one:


• Search
The search engine allows you to search on multiple fields including location (and distance from), activity, and workout facility. One cool feature of the search is that it allows you to search on who are on-line now. One suggestion would be to allow you to limit that also to an area search. They also list a "My Favorite" and "Activity / Keyword" search that both do not seem to work properly (or at all). Two problems with the search are that your profile should be excluded from the search as well as people that specifically designate the gender they want to workout with (i.e. a male should not be able to search upon a female that only wants female workout companions).

• Email
What can I say, it works! It is also divided nicely into incoming and outgoing. Another suggestion, I’m just full of them today, as a person starts to send and received many emails it might be nice to sort them by members as well as date received.

• Messaging & Chat
Again I had no problems with them. The time that I spent on the site the chat room stayed for the most part empty. I can see great benefit to having the messaging and think that is a very nice extra feature to the site.

• Forums
Well put together and they seem active. One thing that I would like to see is a way to search the forums. Especially in the "locals only" forum it would be nice if you could search for your locality so you do not need to go though all of the posts.



• Cost



The site is free to use all of its important features. You have the option to purchase a Gold Membership, the membership lasts for a year and allows you to get new local member notifications and well as view your profile statistics. At this point I am not exactly sure what your profile statistics are.




• Cool Stuff



eXerciseFriends have added a “Groups” area. It’s a nice concept, you can create groups, add members, have forums specific for that group. The groups can be both private and public. It is a new feature added to their site, it would be interesting to see how popular it ends up becoming.

For this week I’ll be comparing eXerciseFriends.com to LifeKnot. I hope to have a comparison done by the end of the week. Let me know what you thought of the last one. One more thing that I am thinking of adding to the site is a statistics link. Basically listing the bare bones of what each site I review has.

• Login procedure



Relatively easy to become a member, there is one page of information to fill out. On this page you need to fill out the standard user info (name, email, handle, password), a profile where you describe yourself a bit as well as pick activities that you are interested in and lastly fill out a header for your profile and set-up your email notifications. There are some aspects of the login that need improvement. When you submit your profile you don’t get a nice confirmation page, you are dumped back to the beginning of the profile submission page. Once you have become a member their login button does not seem to work (I’m using Firefox v.1.0.4). Compared with LifeKnot I like the ability to just create an account without having to think about profile information. LifeKnot lets you create the account and then on your leisure fill out profile and activity information.




• Layout / Ease of use



This is where HobbyMatch.com has the majority of their problems. After you get past the splash page it is not a very attractive site. The Main Member page is just a grouping of boxes / options. The main and most important feature of the site, “view my matches”, looks and feels like a data dump. There does not seem to be any real formatting put into it, just all the information you (or the other members) typed in spitted back to you. On the plus, it is very easy to use but there is a lot of improvement that can be done to this. Comparison, there is none.




• Activities



There seems to be a nice list of activities, 138 to be exact, and I would have to assume that they intend to continue to add more. It is also a nice touch to show your level of interest (or skill) in those activities that you choose. One major inadequacy is the fact that they limit you to only 20 interests or activities. LifeKnot has over 500 activities and does not limit their members to what activities that they might have interest in.




• Features



They have the “view my matches” feature that I mentioned above as well as email and the “advance quick match search”. Since I did not pay for membership I was unable to test both the email and quick match search. I am choosing not to make any comparisons in this category since I was unable to test the pay-for features. In the future I intend to contact them to possibly get a temporary membership to test the site, get some statistics from them, as well as reevaluate any changes they might have made.




• Cost



HobbyMatch.com has three subscription choices, a 6-month plan, 3-month plan, or month-to-month plan. With membership you get to send and receive email messages, perform custom queries, and enjoy special subscriber promotions. As an added bonus 20% of monthly revenue from subscriptions (net of transaction fees) is donated to a charitable organization. As of now LifeKnot is still free and offers all of the same benefits (except the special subscriber promotions which I do not know what they are).




• Cool Stuff



One cool feature is that HobbyMatch.com has is that it allows you to create a club or group membership. I think there should be more thought and development put into this idea but definitely a cool idea.

• Log-in Procedure


• Lay-out/Ease of use


• Activities


• Features


• Cost


• Cool Stuff