Cherry Blossoms
As stated into its About us page, Cherry Blossoms started as old school personals magazine in 1974. The site is fairly well packed with users. The number of active users at the time I’m writing this is 50 914, though it’s not entirely clear who is counted as active user. At even given time There are between 500 and 1200 on-line users, which is impressive.
Design
Site’s design is a bit outdated but pretty functional so you can expect that you’ll find your way around pretty quick.
Features
The site offers useful set of features:
Searching and filtering
You can search and filter users by multiple criteria like country, age, zodiac sign a.s.o.
Emails
Cherry Blossoms seems to discriminate users either by gender or by geographic location. I’ve received tons of emails and I’m not able to read them until I become paying member. You can also receive video messages and the same restriction applies to them.
Chat
You can freely request and answer to chat requests, but you have to be member to actually write anything in the chat, though receiving messages is free for me. The chat is a bit unreliable, while testing it there were frequently lost messages, which led to some confusion and a lot of “Hi”-s and “Are you there”-s.
Video Chat
Same restrictions as chat. Video uses Flash and the quality leaves much to be desired but it’s good enough to recognize someone’s face.
Q&A
Haven’t trued this one yet. But seems like the idea is to ask the other party 10 questions and vice versa.
Favorites/Friends list
You can state your sympathy, by adding people to the “Favourites list”. If you have stronger affection, you can add one to the friend list, which but that requires other party’s confirmation. And he/she may decide to or not to add you back.
Visa help
Cherry Blossoms offers to help you with the legal papers for USA if you decide that long term relationship does not work for you.
Free account
Free account gives you
- Filling your profile
- Browsing users and reading their full profiles
- Sending smiles
- Adding to favorites/friends lists
- Voting for best photos
General rules of thumb
As every dating site, Cherry Blossoms is not devoid of scammers. The administrators take action fast when someone is reported so if you suspect that someone is trying to cheat you, take your time to report it.
As general rule, be suspicious to people with none or single picture. Professional photography sessions may or not mean stolen images but have this in mind.
Never send money to people you don’t know.
Be respectful to others. Make sure you’ve read people’s profiles before contacting them to avoid some unpleasant surprises.
Have fun! Dating can be tedious but can also be fun.
Verdict
Pros
- Many users
- Rich functionality
- Quick Support
Cons
- You can’t do much with free account
- Outdated design
- Chat looses messages