Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 4/5 Features: 3/5 Design: 5/5 Content: 4/5

• Straight-up dating agency for people looking for affairs and casual relationships
• Direct and to the point. You get a slew of profiles when you search according to proximity, and none of them seem fake.
• Simple, functional design. Just what you need and nothing else.

The Full Story:

This is a nice, easy website for people looking to hook up locally, particularly if it’s for an extra-marital tryst. Ashley Madison’s concept is “a dating agency online”. After logging in, the main options presented are to: open your mail, update your profile, or search for profiles. There are no bothersome ads, no link to this and that. There isn’t even any of the harping cams and videos upsell advertising that many adult dating websites have.

What you see is what you get. Take the search for example. You can do a simple or advanced search. With advanced search, you can filter for fields. You can remove the “attached” people from your results page, if you are only looking for singles, or you can search for them exclusively, if you’re after the thrill of a fling.

Your search results in a list of profiles. You will see the basics elements of the profiles there, such as picture, location, age, what they’re looking for, and their current relationship status. For each result, you’ll see if the person’s online or not. You have an option to immediately chat with those online, if the person isn’t online you can message her or send her an online gift using credit points, which you purchase—a slightly different model than the subscription one used by most site. (A good model, we think—you only pay for what you use.) Profiles also have a private “showcase” link; you will only see the photos in here if you have permission from the showcase owner.

And that’s it. That’s basically the website.

Ashley Madison boasts a higher success rate in terms of hookups and affairs instigated than most other sites; the lack of community chat, webcams, and porn may be the main reasons why. Contact here is one-on-one, focused, personal, and direct. People here know what they want and are determined to get it.

For example, when you send a gift, there’s a standard flirty note there, and a field where you can add your own message. You are discouraged from sending random gifts to random people, because every gift you send costs you credits. When you “wink” at someone, you need to let them know what your wink means. There’s practically no way to avoid getting straight to the point. When you find someone and contact them you’re almost forced to let them know right away what you’re after. To me, that’s how an adult dating site should work. No games.

As for the design, the website is easy to navigate. Your standard links are those to your email, the profile search, and the links to update your profile or account. There’s no confusion as to where you’d need to go.

When you need to contact someone on your search results, you just go into their profiles, and chat, message, or give a gift. These are the only interaction allowed within this dating service, and it’s enough.

Like the site itself, the design is functional, straightforward, and clean – the only thing that bugged me visually was the “100% Affair Guaranteed” banner.

This banner promotes a paid service of the site (it’s an upsell). For almost $300, Ashley Madison Agency guarantees that you’ll hook up with someone when you use their website – so long as you undertake to chat with someone, message someone, and give gifts to someone a certain number of times per month for three months. Failure to do so voids the guarantee. You don’t get anything extra with this – it’s just a guarantee. Unless you’re a real troglodyte I’m pretty sure you’d be able to achieve the same result without the guarantee.

The thing is the banner is shoved in your face every time you load a page. Literally, they show the banner every time they get a chance. And it’s not like you can just click on the banner to close it, or choose to hide it. It stays there until you move to another page. It starts to feel irritating and intrusive.

I guess nothing’s perfect. Overall however, the Ashley Madison Agency seems on to a winner, though, and represents real innovation in the space. You might not be able to do better for your buck.

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 2/5    Features: 3/5    Design: 4/5    Content: 4/5

• Clean-looking site with a tight, integrated design and interface.
• Fake profiles galore.
• Chatroom shills.
• Lots of XXX content, but more of a porn site, really?

The Full Story:

This was going to be a review of fling.com, but they decided they were going to have some big problem with our credit card, so we’ve postponed it until we can figure that crap out. Instead, this will be a review of uLust.com.

So I kicked it off by landing here, signing up and logging in. Here’s a screenshot of the members’ area.

Well, first impressions: it’s a clean, white, uncluttered, and attractive site with a lot of Ajax-y Web 2.0 bells and whistles. The upsell advertising (cams and penis pills while I was on the site) isn’t so in-your face and ubiquitous as it is with AFF.

The membership database, however, is considerably smaller than AFF ‘s–clocking in at around 5.5 million, but while I was logged in there seemed to be a proportionately larger number of active members; namely, 57-115k active/5.5 million for uLust.com compared to 132k active/32 million on AFF. My later interaction with the site ended up leaving me with some serious reservations about the accuracy of that figure, though. For which read on.

So I finished filling in my profile details, fired up the search function, and went trawling for tail. Now what you should probably know about mainstream adult dating sites is that a sizable percentage of them create fake profiles, usually of women, to attract and retain the interest of paying male members. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of suspicious profiles, even by industry standards. Like “the overwhelming majority” a lot.

Some, like this one, is just too “Penthouse Pet” to be real, while others, like this one, were real-but-c’mon-guys-it’s-a- freaking-hooker. Genuine profiles like this one, this one, and this one were in the decided minority plus, uh, you know. Look at them. “Hoorah?”

It wasn’t too long before the whole site started to give me a serious “porn” vibe. It seemed to be far more about the fake profiles and shilling for camwhores than it was about anything else. Like, for example, “adult dating”. Or “getting laid.” There was also an annoying bug in the picture viewing code, which kept distorting the picture dimensions in the thumbnail view when I was reviewing profiles.

After about half an hour searching profiles I wandered over to check the “Members’ Video Chat”. The girls here (and surprise, they were all girls) all seemed to be professional websluts doing “teaser” shows. They weren’t overly responsive to what was being typed, and one of the rooms was empty when I looked at it. Two others closed while I was viewing them, leading me to suspect the girls had received requests for private shows .

The main Cams link here goes to pages full of thumbnails. You can click on a thumbnail to talk to the associated girl if she’s available AND you join the ulustcams.com site. Joining this complementary site requires validation of your credit card, then presumably (I didn’t investigate much further) the payment of some per-minute charge to naked cam-to-cam with the googly-eyed slut of your choice.

Like I said, a glorified porn site. The “Movies” link takes you to a bunch of porn clips (yeah, I’m on an adult dating site because I only want porn, right?) These clips have some Firefox playability issues, which I couldn’t be bothered figuring out. The user videos are little better, though they suffer from the same issues as the profiles. Namely that a lot of them consist of generic porn content. i.e. “they’re fakes.”

uLust’s chatrooms were all dead when I looked in on them, except for one (the “Lounge”) which had a fake-profile “babe” chatting in it. This prosti-shill regaled the room with a banal chronicle of “her” daily routine (“Yeah, sorry I was just on the phone. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty tired now. Yeah, wonder what I’ll have for dinner tonight.”) The (old, unattractive, desperate, horny) men floating around the room were hanging on her every utterance, entranced. Some of them definitely seemed to be regulars. They had kind of a leering, wolfish demeanor and snippily informed me that if any REAL women turned up (keep dreaming, losers!) the “vetereins” would have first crack at them.

I scanned through the forums and groups. They have a reasonable number of posts, but they’re all moderated (there’s a general theme of heavy-handed moderation, presumably because the owners of the property don’t want people squawking publicly about how much the site, you know, sucks.) You can see that most of them are of the LADIES HERE I AM LET’S FUCK variety. Yeah. I hear that’s how the hardcore playaz really pull.

As you can probably tell by now, I was less than impressed by my uLust.com experience. There’s very little evidence of genuine community here and I’m skeptical about both the userbase size and participation level claims that they’re making. On the bright side, the site looks good, and there’s a ton of porn (movies and galleries) there, if that’s really what you’re after. But don’t expect to get laid, and don’t expect not to feel like you’ve been cheated, if you join expecting anything other than a boatload of porn.

C-. Must try harder.