Thefin.com: What's your opinion?

After further review, thefin.com turns out to be a better effort that I had originally thought.

First, let me tell you what I like. As Jason points out, there are some really interesting aspects to the "Find a Charter/Guide area. It's a nice interface to find a charter. However, I did have some difficulty finding a New York charter by using the map function...it was too cluttered. Using the zip lookup worked very well.

The videos are great! Watching them really gave me the itch to get back to the surf.

However, I must say that the site is still lacking something important. Even after I login I don't get the feeling anyone in the site has a connection to me. This is probably due to the newness of the community. If I were running the site I would recommend pushing relationships as soon as I registered...show me people who are related to me by geography, fishing types, etc.

If he is worried about the chicken/egg problem, I would recommend a direct online marketing campaign that targets registrations. Do some SEM and have the users hit a registration page immediately. Your registration conversions would be higher and that's what it's all about. Build relationships and show users who they are related to.

Let's give this guy the chance to show us he can make a great fishing SNS website. Go to thefin.com and register. The more of us there, the better the site will be...hopefully!

I want to hear from you. Please post to my blog and tell me what you think about the site.

Capt. Kevin