Where is the ‘MySpace’ for Adults?
Frequently, I hunt for new social networking Web sites. MySpace feeling like a dull moment out of my generation, I wanted to find something different, that wasn’t a place for 13 year old emo kids. Not that they are bad, but I tend to not care much about how difficult their suburbia life is when they couldn’t go to a concert. Cold hearted, I know.
Shawn told me about CherryTAP. CherryTAP is different because it is intended for adults, and the theme is that you’re in a bar. I like that environment, because it allows people to have a more structured purpose there.
For instance, on Myspace, you made your page, customized it with a CSS layout, added your friends and messaged each other in a behavior like e-mail of yesterday. That’s pretty much it, very minimal focus on pushing users to do other things.
The target audience of CherryTAP is adult. I expected a million requests to be friends from well-endowed women, but I didn’t! For some reason, CherryTAP has grown without much interference from spammers. I like that. I can only wish them the best in holding it down as they continue to grow.
CherryTAP rewards users for their interaction (or other folks call it, “engagement”). For example, the more time you spend on the site, upload pictures, update your profile, comment on profiles, rate pictures — you earn points. While it may seem a little cheesy at first, after a little while you get that Endorphin kick for earning points and thus, more time spent on the site. The more Cherry Points you earn, the more features you unlock (like photos caps and more).
The overall appearance of the site is dark, but not gothic-looking. It does need some CSS hacks to clean it up and better organize it in my opinion. Being a fan of “build now, tweak later,” this site is definitely reaching their goal.
They’ve implemented the basic features of a “Hot or Not” site and have considerably primitive search functions. I expect as the site grows, they will meet the needs of their users. Let’s just hope they’re tracking the traffic activity on those areas to look for areas to improve.
Something unique to the social networking world that CherryTAP does well, is the ability to educate users of new widgets and tips on filling in their profile. Traditionally, most sites let users just free-form every pixel without having any guidance. From the looks of it, it appears to be genuine (organic) recommendations like Slide and others. Looks promising.
My personal experience with the site’s community is the users are nice and friendly. Maybe a bit too friendly for my liking, but that’s OK. As with many social networking sites, the folks who are singles want to mingle, and this site makes it easy for everyone to join.
In case anyone is wondering, I wrote this brief review on CherryTAP voluntarily, it happens to be they turned out good. If you want to suggest for me to voluntarily review your site, let me know and I just might get around to it. 
Hey Joe,
Thanks for checking out the site! My buddy just sent me this link and said I should read it. I was expecting to hear about how ugly the site is, etc. You’re the first person to notice that I’ve spent most of my time working on the functionality, and not on the looks (mostly because my css-fu is weak). I figured if people liked it, I’d get some of my friends to help make it look nice.
Also, thanks for the props on the non-spamness of the site. Not many people mention that, but I think it’s an out-of-sight-out-of-mind thing. Since day one I have spent countless hours reducing the ability of spammers to do anything useful on the site (and at times, pissing off members because of the anti-spam logic). I can’t put into words how much I hate autobot (CT, more than meets the eye! haha!) spammers and stuff like that…. I work at least one day per week on blocking them or writing code to detect them.
If you have any thoughts on easy stuff we could do to make the site look better/cleaner, feel free to let me know… cheers!
ps: forgot to mention– our search functionality is very basic because we’re still a pretty small site…. and to be honest, hardly anyone uses or requests search functionality… i think it’s because the site is built around interacting with other people who’re online at the moment.
-mike