Ebony Friends
Ebony Friends is a dating site that looks to create a community where black friends and singles feel at home. They’ve put together a total-package site that seems to suit the needs of anyone looking for love online. We took a closer look to see if it was worth the price of admission.
The profile quality on Ebony Friends is decent. They don’t ask for much information when you first sign up so you can get in and start your tour of the site quickly and easily. The vast majority of the questions are multiple choice. There aren’t any extensive essays to fill out or complicated matching systems to contend with. Once in, you’ll find that most of the members are black but Ebony Friends isn’t a completely ethnic-specific site. There are lots of profiles with pictures, too, so feel free to window shop all you want. You will find people of other races online and many who are looking for interracial relationships.
“Ebony Friends won’t let free members run searches for people closer than 100 miles.”
Search options can make or break a site for new users. This is where you get to find out who’s online in your area and that can determine if you want to go ahead with a full membership or not. EbonyFriends.com lets you search for love but puts limits on your ability to filter results. You can search by country or by distance from your zip code. Searches by zip code are pretty standard these days. The farther you’re willing to travel, the more people you can possibly meet. However, closer is always better, but Ebony Friends won’t let free members run searches for people closer than 100 miles. If you want to pay, you can search within 50 miles, but until you do, you’re stuck sorting through the throng of ads that will undoubtedly be returned. One of the nice features is that you can search for men and women, no matter what your sexual preference may be. If you pay for membership, you can tailor your searches to a wider range of criteria. You can then sort by ethnicity, body type, religion, marital status and many other options. Some of these would be very helpful for free members but it’s just a case of Ebony Friends using a big carrot at the end of the stick. They want you to pay and they plan on making it worth your while.
Most dating site will let you try before you buy – at least to a certain extent. Sending smiles to members is a commonly feature and Ebony Friends certainly allows you to do this. You can send a smile with a number of canned text messages that allows you to indicate your degree of interest. You are encouraged to post messages on profiles such as general comments about person. You can do this for free, too, as well as take part in message board discussions. That’s about where your free access runs out. If you want to send a message to someone, you have to pay for at least a months worth of access.
EbonyFriends.com seems to be a site that’s gaining popularity but it doesn’t have nearly the numbers that more general dating sites have. The inability to search within a small geographic radius is one of the biggest drawbacks. That, coupled with the fact that it won’t tell you when a specific profile last logged on, makes it difficult to be sure of how busy the site is for any area. We recommend caution, but it never hurts to browse!