Bison: Competitor Analysis: Engage.com, part 2

I signed up to their free service, free for 6 months while they are in beta mode, to see what the customer experiences. My first impression is the site has potential, in that it has the "match-making" idea, but it doesn't fully meet all of the things I have been envisioning for Bison.

1) Quality of people - it let me sign up as a single dude with no kids -- that's too easy for anyone to sign up and scam people. In addition they did not ask for a mailing address or telephone number, which makes me want to believe that it is way too easy to just sign up.

2) Weak Social Network implementation - the "network" is a list of people you want to track... these people are just profiles and the options for communicating with you network are the same as if you were trying to talk to a prospect; this is okay, but it is kinda hokey. It feels to me like a MySpace "add me as a friend" option where the list grows and grows. For Bison, I am envisioning a robust social network where the user can define the strength of the relationship/friendship, perhaps tag the relationship as: work, football buddy, church friend, etc... Then on top of this, the users are able to see how people are connected, not just the flat list of "friends". I'm thinking of a node with radiating lines out to other nodes, which in turn continue to have radiating lines. The network really grows. In addition, with the tagging of the type of relationship, this allows for a user to quickly see a prospects "social network", the activities and interests they have, the type of people they know, etc...

3) Communication mechanisms are basic - they only allow "anonymous emails" to be sent. Bison will include anonymous emails, anonymous text messaging, anonymous voice mail, and anonymous video. Users on he receiving end of these communications can choose to accept these forms of communication and are able to block certain users from reaching them.

4) No mechanism to make the suitor different from others - There is no way to be creative in the way they communicate with a prospect. Emails and that is it. It's a sad implementation. Bison will allow users to send creative gifts such as flowers, cards, photos, etc... I can send flowers to a prospect's work address, without me knowing her address. It's too easy to implement, perhaps they will do that
later...

Overall, I think Engage's intent is a good one, in that they try to get our friends to work with us in finding a mate, but the implementation is outdated already. I think they could have emphasized the personal network more, because if people don't use it, this site is just like any other dating site -- a bunch of photos. I've looked at a lot profiles and almost all of them had empty networks.

A quick search for all the women in the US between ages 18 and 99 gave me 51 pages of 10 photos each = 510 total women in the US. Hmmm, not very impressive numbers, but I don't know when they launched.

Long story short, Bison is still very different.

-john