My nephew was reading the Daily Mail and came across an article about 'the fastest-growing social network in the world'. The name of it sounded like a bad take on my first boyfriend's family name so we decided to check it out for fun.
Badoo
It seemed ordinary enough. I didn't have to actually create a profile, I used my facebook login and instantly my DOB, name and facebook profile pictures were imported to Badoo. Pathetically on the right hand column there was a popularity meter telling me that my popularity was very poor. There were pics in a scroll along bar at the top of the page and for anything really cool to do on the site you have to pay for it. So just for the heck of it my nephew and I filled out the other profile bits. If you have awesome eyesight you can see what I posted on my profile in the pic.
Three hours later I had over 150 profile visits, 2 pages of private messages and over a 100 people interested in meeting me. After I clearly said I hate people and was interested in meeting someone Irish, it seems people still wanted to meet me. Absolutely disconcerting.
This isn't so much a social networking website in the same tune as facebook but it felt more like a dating website like match.com. Clearly it cannot be eHarmony because then I'd be incompatible. Yes eHarmony told me at age 18 I was incompatible with anyone on their website and I've been terminally unique (thank you Jay Blahnik) ever since.
The difference between Badoo and Facebook is that Badoo is for lonely or creepy people and I use creepy because a 46-year-old man looked at my profile and I felt violated. Facebook is definitely for social networking; Badoo, not so much.
Facebook has 500 million users and since it was founded in 2006, Badoo has over 114 million users. No competition for Facebook as far as I can see.
In the time it took me to blog this post (10 minutes, I checked by the time on the songs I've listened to while blogging) I have had 25 profile visits and 11 private messages :/
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