Welcome to my pet project idea for a fun and simple yet full featured no BS way of finding a friend or friends to hang out with.
People who are interested in the same kinds of activities, hobbies, sports, and pastimes that you are.
I know there are other sites out there that are meant to accomplish this, but to me they feel bloated and clunky and just not very fun or useful.

So instead of all that, I wanted to make something really simple. Something that's streamlined and straight to the point.

The idea is for you to be able to create an account and then right away add things you like to do so other people who like those same things can find you and you can find them.
In short you can say my goal is to make a site that connects people in a way that's simple and quick and without all the unnecessary nonsense.

And I realize I may not be there yet. And that's OK. Because this site is still a work in progress, and I'm still trying :)

 

 

This is not a big project. There is not a team of developers. The development "team" is a single person - me.

There will not be hundreds of thousands or millions of users for you to connect with here. No. Because this is just a pet project there will be no marketing or advertising. Maybe over time Google will find and index a few pages here, which will eventually result in a few people joining. The perhaps a little word of mouth might bring in a few more. My optimism makes me think that maybe, just maybe, once finished the user base will be in the many dozens, perhaps even eventually reaching into the hundreds.

Do keep in mind if you decide to join and use this site that it is still very much a work in progress. There are things that won't work. There are things that worked yesterday that won't work today. And there are things that will work sometimes and not at other times.

There could, and likely will be, data errors. Data errors that mismatch you. Data errors that result in erroneous matches or no matches at all. Data errors that result in your account being removed, altered or modified in some way. And this is all part of working with software in Beta mode. By creating an account or using this site you are saying that you are OK with being a Beta tester, and you agree that I am not responsible in any way for anything that may come from your use of this site. I think and hopefully you do too that this is only fair.

 

 

Not right now. Currently my expenses are minimal. This is a small site and it costs me almost nothing to run. And I wouldn't feel right about charging anything for you to use it. However...

That super low cost also comes with a few caveats. Namely processing power. Meaning I have very little. So if a few users were to for example upload tons of photos, or send out lots of messages, it wouldn't take long before my little server here would be overloaded. And I don't want that. I don't think you want the either.

So this means that I have to impose some kinds of limits on usage.

In the beginning what I will do is somewhat limit the number of messages you are able to send in a day as well as the number of photos you can upload to a certain extent. I think that's the only way to save resources that's also fair to everyone. I'm sure you'll still have plenty of opportunity to find others and connect.

If the user base were to grow over time the server will become sluggish. To help combat this I'm thinking of offering an upgraded experience where a user can opt to have greater upload and message sending capabilities for a small fee. This small fee would allow me to purchase more server processing power, so I see it as a win win for everyone.

 

 

That's a hard question to answer since it is not something that I originally planned on doing. So keep in mind that whatever I list here may very well change before I implement an upgraded membership option.

The first question that must be answered is at what point would I need to charge in order to keep the site operational. I believe the best solution here is to look at the number of users and consider the average processing power needed for each user. The site is currently running on a very no frills server, and I'm guessing this server could support somewhere between 100-200 users before I would need to pay $$ to upgrade to a more powerful server. I could be wrong about this number, as it really depends on how much these 100-200 users make use of features such as advanced search, image uploading, and image viewing which all take a lot of server processing power. So the number of users before the server becomes too sluggish could be a little more or a little less than my guess of 100-200.

What I have decided to do is offer a free basic annual membership to the first 100 users. After the first 100 users I'll offer the basic membership at X dollars per month along with an optional upgraded membership that allows you to do more.

And I will offer this upgraded membership on a tiered basis, meaning in the beginning I will offer it for less and as the number of users grows the cost will rise accordingly to keep up with the added cost of buying more processing power to handle the additional users.

There are somewhat similar sites out there charging anywhere from $65 to $120 per month and honestly their features and functionality are nowhere near as good as this site. What they have going for them is they have been around for a long time and they have a lot of users. However it's common knowledge that a lot of the users presented are likely fake users or users that haven't been on the site in many months or even years. This is done to make the number of users on these sites look much larger than what it actually is. Some sites even go out of their way to hide information like the last time a user was on the site. I think this is information you should know, so on this site I will show you that.

 

 

Can do - The purpose of this site is to meet other people who are interested in the same types of activities you are. For example let's say you are interested in running or maybe something more extreme like skydiving. When you create your account you list the activities you are most interested in. Then other users with similar interests will be able to search for and find you, just like you will be able to search for and find them. You are welcome to use this site to find friends or partners interested in any legal activity.

Don't do - Please don't list activities that are not legal. For example don't list that you are interested in dog fighting. Other users can flag your interests if they believe they violate the no illegal activity rule, at which point I may step in and remove that interest from your account. I don't want to do that and quite frankly I don't have time to be micromanaging accounts in that way. So be forewarned that if you break this rule, especially if you break it more than once, you may find that your account has been permanently terminated :(

 

Many of the features of this site rely on zip code data to function correctly. Zip codes are a U.S. thing. While other countries have area designation schemes that are similar I am not sure if other postal codes will work correctly with this site. If you are in another country and want to give it a try I'd appreciate it if you will share some feedback of your experience with me.

 

Because the site is in Beta you can and probably will. If you would like to help out and see that your problem gets fixed you can send me a message detailing what the problem is and what you were trying to do when the problem happened along with the date and time that it happened. Feedback like this from users like you is vital to getting the site to a stable release.