I was recently looking for a room somewhere in the city on Craigslist, and realized that, even though Craigslist has the largest user base, it doesn’t do a good job of organizing rommmate matching data. There’s no set format for gender, sleeping, and other lifestyle preferences. So, I was curious to see if there were any companies out there whose goal is to match roommates.

This was when I stumbled upon Roomster, which has a decent amount of lifestyle data that you can enter. You can also browse people with similar interests who are either looking for a roommate, or offering a room. There’s also a way to let Roomster automatically suggest matches, but, the ones given to me seemed quite arbitrary, either due to the limited user base or the actual matching algorithms.

This is all well and good–I didn’t have any hopes that Roomster would be the holy grail of roommate matching. That’s when I got an email from Roomster notifying me that a potential roommate had sent me a message. I quickly logged in, only to find this upgrade screen:

I couldn’t believe it: I had to upgrade to a premium account in order to view my messages! A core functionality such as messaging should never be a premium service on a roommate matching site. Any restrictions based on premiums should be reserved for power user types of functions. Flickr offers all of their services for free, but with a bandwidth limit. If I want to upload a few photos, message people, and make a few albums, I could use their service for free. The equivalent of restricting my messaging capability on Roomster would be restricting my commenting ability in Flickr, which would be utterly ridiculous.

The bottom line is that all I want to do is to read and write a few messages. I’m just a casual Roomster user who is turned off by the fee to read my messages. What Roomster could do is to limit the number of messages per day or week, based on the free account. Another option would be to charge the people who are renting their rooms, rather than the people hunting for rooms. The new pricing model in Web 2.0 is to charge the few, and give away the technology to the rest. Roomster is charging everyone a flat fee to get the basics of their service, which is not a good move.

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Categories - Business, Roomster |