About
Profileheaven.com began around March 2002, under the first name face2meet. This was first brought up to prominence by the lead admin of the time Mark Harburn, and after a short amount of time became profileheaven. A few years latter the site was re-launched as faces.com after the purchase of faces.com and face-pic.com by the symbios group.
The site itself used to have around 95% of its members from the UK, with other countries, prominently users from America and Australia, making up the remainder. The typical demographic to begin with was members between the ages of 16 to 22, mostly of a female gender.
Profileheaven.com became so as a relaunch from Face2Meet to bring more attraction to the internet using public to attain more of a drive of being "one of the more different" profile-based sites out there. The site became more popular and revered throughout 2005 and 2006 making many revisions and updates as time went by. As a result of this, the site went on to win the award of Website of the Year in the community site category - and overall winner for 2006. The website currently has approximately 250,000 members, many of which are from the UK, in particular Scotland and northern England with some from the United States, Australia and the rest of the world. Since 2006 the site has increased its memberbase to around 400,000 members, with roughly an eighty percent userbase from the UK.
As many other social networking sites provide, each user can create a profile and blog about themselves. Users can link these profiles together to form a linked friend network. Other notable features are web forums, unlimited photo galleries, video, live video chat, Flash games and a points ranking system. The site had a major overhaul around the start of 2007, bringing into play a Clan system (similar to creating your own groups) as well as music profiles, allowing those with relatively unknown and local bands to come aboard and showcase the material they have to offer to a wider audience.
In February 2008, the site was bought by the Symbios Group with the intention to do much more with the site and relaunch under the name "Faces.com". The original faces.com derives from a global audience with approximately 300,000 members at the beginning, and the total user base, once completed, should be around 750,000 to 800,000 members from all over the world. Later in September, the Symbios group and its CEO, Martin Montague, also acquired the rights to another profile-based website called "Face-pic.com", and also intends to merge this into the final workings of Faces.com. On completion of this, it should create a user base close to two million users.
There also will be new features incorporated into the new site, however these are being kept "top secret" by the Symbios Group. Currently there is no launch date specified for Faces.com, but this (of course) will be subject to change as a lot of work is being undertaken by Symbios.
From the Symbios CEO, Martin Montague: "This is a natural step for our business within the exciting Social networking channel, especially at a time when analysts remain bullish about the market; users accessing social networks are on the increase too. I believe we can create a unique and exciting proposition that will become a benchmark for the next generation of users and social networking sites.”
Martin added, “We’ve been reading the market through our continued play in the mobile billing and dating sector, and at the top of our existing customers’ priority list is the requirement to access truly innovative social networking sites complete with great tools and apps that can be delivered to their page and mobile phone. Now we have access to a thriving community of 15-24 year olds that will help get us off the starting block quickly and improve our insight. This will allow us to profile the users more precisely. We aim to use this intelligence to deliver some fantastic benefits to existing and new users of our brand.”
In August 2009, Profileheaven.com re-opened as a standalone site, leaving the now ailing Faces.com.
In 2010, plans were drawn up to replace the faces.com site and merge it with face-pic.com using the member base to lever an idea to create an online fraternity as well as a new social network aimed at popular 18-30 year olds and centres of influence.
Read more about this topic: Faces.com