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Another site full of unfulfilled promises. Rating: A Big ol’ “F” Really nothing good here.

To be fair, it is (according to the site itself) still a beta. But you still have to pay to use it and my biggest issues won’t be fixed, I guarantee it.

I first discovered the site when it popped up in the advertising space of a certain popular BDSM networking site.

PinPoinsX is primarily designed as a mobile app, operating from your smart phone or other capable mobile devices. The basic concept is that, at any time, you can long onto the system and see the physical location of people near you who are also logged in, which is a really cool concept.

Unfortunately, like 90% of awesome ideas, it is being operated to sap as much money from you as they can. In fact, this one goes a bit farther than almost any I’ve seen. You cannot do anything at all until you have upgraded to a paid account. There is a 1-day trial that is hidden low on the upgrade page, however, if you want to take it for a spin. But to be honest, I wouldn’t waste the time.

This site is almost completely useless even in the most populated cities. Even with very loose filtering, I only got about 6 hits within an hour’s drive of me. When I set the filter to what I actually want, that number drops to only 1.

Much like my recent review of FetConnect.com, I can see that the site might be useful to and valuable people if there were many more users. Unlike FetConnect, however, I am not willing to recommend or even continue watching this site. The reason for this choice is very simple. This is obviously a profit venture with no observable effort to benefit anyone.

As the good folks at okcupid.com said in an April 2010 blog post, “…pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers’ disappointment”. Basically, if you actually find what you’re looking for, you’ll stop paying, so instead, they try to make you feel like what you want is out there, but prevent you from actually getting it. One way that they do this is by making it nearly impossible to completely delete your account, even if you stop paying, resulting a bunch of dead profiles sitting out there with pictures of someone attractive, but no actual person receiving the messages.

Finally, I can’t help but feel like this site is mostly designed to bring traffic into business, including anything from local sex shops to escort services. The default settings include these things in your searches unless you specifically go in and remove them. This means that when you think you are seeing matches all over your map, you are actually just seeing a bunch of prostitutes and pro-dommes. (Which I hate lumping together, but in this case, that’s how they are presented) I put up with advertising on free sites because, well, they’re free. But to have this advertising masked as matches defaulted onto you even while you pay to use the service is pretty sketchy.

There are a select few pay sites that I actually think are productive, but this isn’t one of them. If you really want to do the trial and see how worthless it really is, feel free. The one upside to this site is that you don’t need a credit card for their free trial. But seriously, it only took me about 5 minutes to look at every profile in my immediate area, and see very clearly that there was nothing for me there.