A little while ago I had a chat with some single friends that got me thinking about online dating. Not participating (my wife would kill me), but the industry itself. For the maturity of the industry and the amount of dollars around it there still appeared to be a couple of things my friends were dissatisfied with – the look/feel of most sites and the trust issues around meeting people online.

The other day I met Sally Watts from Meet My Mate and I think I may have found something that will change how my friends feel.

Meet My Mate is an Aussie dating site that recently “launched”. I use the term launched lightly because at the moment it looks like they have about 50 users. That having been said, there’s enough there, both at the moment and in Sally’s plans, to get me excited about its potential.

The most obvious thing about the site is the hot UI. Sally comes from a design background and you can tell. Compared to the other dating sites I’ve looked at, this thing is miles ahead in terms of unsleezyness (is that a word?) and simplicity.

When you move on to using the site things are also very interesting. The basic premise of the site is you and your mates work together to both build your profile and to look for people that you might be interested in (or that might be interested in you). The whole referral idea is an interesting one as it’s how we tend to meet people offline.

Now, it should be noted that online social dating isn’t a new idea. For instance, the Meet My Mate concept is somewhat borrowed from a similar site in the UK and TechCrunch recently ran an article on another social dating site called Engage. On top of that more general social apps like facebook/myspace etc. have always been used by a large amount of people as quasi-social dating apps as well.

That having been said Meet My Mate works a little differently. Rather than adding a social layer as a feature, it’s a core part of the sign up process and of the site itself. This really helps with the trust issues around the type of people you’re meeting (and even the friends you’re eventually going to have to hang out with if you hook up)

Having spoken to Sally I know some big plans are also in the works. The first plan is an upcoming promotional campaign to get more users. The second is to finish developing and release some unique features that will truly differentiate Meet My Mate in this space (I can’t say too much but one exciting feature that Sally spoke about is mobile related and uniquely addresses one of the concerns I mentioned above – trust). The third is to introduce new revenue streams.

It won’t be easy to succeed in this space, but if the Meet My Mate team can even do most of what they’re planning it should be happy days.