Movietally and Understanding Web 2.0 Design

haym37 writes "Ajit Jaokar over at the Open Gardens blog has an article up on a growing service called movietally. The service allows users to tag the movies they've seen and receive automatic recommendations for movies they might like to see. He describes it as a 'textbook case of web 2.0 design' and goes into detail about the fundamental principles of web 2.0 design and how movietally relates to them. The interesting part about all of this is that, according to the article, the founder is only fifteen years old and created it in under a month."

nothing to see there

search movies / porn : your search returned no results
how exactly old is he?

Re:nothing to see there

Old enough to be able to Google for a very similar concept and find Flixter [flixter.com].

Blog Link

Since the summary doesn't see fit to actually post a link to the FA: enjoy [futuretext.com].

Meh...

I think I'll wait for web 2.1 to come along so that all the bugs will be fixed.

What exactly is so 2.0 about this?

A previous post mentioned that Netflix did this a long time ago. Amazon did the same thing for books even before that. So how exactly does this demonstrate anything compelling about web 2.0?

Web 2.0

A "textbook example" of Web 2.0?

What the author of the article sees:

1. "Writing Semantic Markup: Transition to XML"
2. "Remixing Content: About When and What, not Who or Why"
3. "Emergent Navigation and Relevance: Users are in Control"
4. "Adding Metadata Over Time: Communities Building Social Information"
5. "Shift to Programming: Separation of Structure and Style"

What I see:
1. Tags
2. Large font
3. Rounded edges
4. Top-right search box
5. Prominent, two-tone, quasi-logical logo

Does it really work?

The service allows users to tag the movies they've seen and receive automatic recommendations for movies they might like to see.

That assumes that users tag consistently, fairly, clearly, and correctly. It's also vulnerable to spamming and trolling.
 
Tagging by users works within small communities - but I doubt it will scale up.

Or, how about WikiLens

Also collaborative filtering, rate a bunch of products, which could well be films, or anything else, and have products recommended by people who rated other things in a similar way to you. I have to be honest, it could be implemented better but it basically works.

http://www.wikilens.org/ [wikilens.org]

 

Textbook case? Of what?

It's certainly not a textbook case of good design. The two identical search boxes, the huge fonts for the tags...the fact when I visit the homepage if I had no idea what a tagging system was (and plenty of people don't) I'd be totally confused...

Since when did Web 2.0 = forgetting all about usability and going with 'it looks minimal, so therefore cool'

Oh, wait. It's always been like that.

Re:Textbook case? Of what?

Since when did Web 2.0 = forgetting all about usability and going with 'it looks minimal, so therefore cool'

It may look minimal, but it's a monster of table driven madness. Viewing the source reveals that they are thinking of W2.0 in the marketing and social sense only. The page validation [w3.org] shows that their programmers don't really give a care what HTML is and how relates to W2.0 [wikipedia.org] in the first place. There's not even a doctype declared. A textbook of W2.0 design my ass. Movietally is more of a textbook example of jumping on a marketing bandwagon and ignoring how to actually code symantically.

last.fm anyone?

I am guessing he cribbed the idea from the likes of http://last.fm/ [last.fm] , a music site which has a similar system. (Editorialization: Except better)

Why is this interesting?

The interesting part about all of this is that, according to the article, the founder is only fifteen years old and created it in under a month."

It's not really a complex system he has set up here. But really at 15, this isn't that impressive. We're in a technology advanced time now where junior high students are taking programming classes and building their own site and computers all the time. Computers are still the future. What would have been interesting is if he was 5 years old. Think about it all the people on here that have less computer-literate neighbors and friends that are older...is it really far fetched that a 15 year old could do this?

The important point...

I think the important point here is that the kid is 15 years old and is doing some decent work in making a site using semi-recent ideas in web development.

In many ways, the site seems to be a grotesque travesty of web 2.0 memes. For example, one of the points the article mentions:

5. "Shift to Programming: Separation of Structure and Style"

The site uses tables for layout - this certainly isn't characteristic of Web 2.0 or seperating structure from style. 90% of web 2.0 sites do it better, with CSS.

But that's not the point - or at least it shouldn't be. What we have here is a case of the next generation of web developers starting with some of the newer ideas in design as their base. And it's still pretty impressive if a 15-year-old put it together in a month.

Not exactly new

Besides the non web-2.0 versions at Amazon/NetFlix/the like, Spout [spout.com] has been doing this for awhile with full tagging, community features, and everything else that screams web 2.0. Furthermore, Spout has a stronger developer base and a more flushed-out featureset. While I think it's great that a 15-year-old can put together a neat website incorporating many of these newer interface and social networking rules, I prefer to use a really well made website. Flickr, digg, and the rest aren't just popular because of pretty colors and tags... they're popular because they use these user experience technologies on top of a well-built system.

More irrational exhuberance

Ahhh, the continued irrational exhuberance of Web 2.0. Where's the beef?

If you want a real site for getting movie recommendations then try http://www.moviefreak.org/ [moviefreak.org] or any of a number of movie recommendation sites that will give you better results w/o all the Web 2.0 hype.

iTunes Media Store will F*king Kill Movietally

Let's be honest for a few minutes here - most online reviews are either so wordy you'd be saving time just watching the flick or they consist of some 12-year-old saying "OMG TiHz M0v13 iZ T3h SuX0r!!!!1". It's hardly compelling enough content to make a site worth a visit. I've also never really felt that what was lacking from my blog* (which no one reads anyway) was an RSS feed of someone else's favorite movies. I'm not one to toot Apple's horn, but they already have a peer review system, members' "favorite" lists, tube-clogging truckloads of trailers, and pretty soon (once they get all the licencing deals ironed out with the rest of the studios) the ability to purchase, download and watch any movie of your choice - all in one place.

Is the real story here that some 15-year-old put up a website, outside of MySpace?

* Perhaps that's what Web 2.0 is really about. Automatically sharing dynamic, user-generated content that never actually gets read.

15? no big deal.

AJAX concepts aren't exacly rocket science, I am sure a 13 year old could do it given the drive (*sigh* to be a teenager with all that time and energy to devote to sheer folly.)

When I was 15 I was learning BASIC in highschool on PETs, back then that was about it for the resources available to me. Nowadays there is a lot more available opportunity for kids to explore. (thank goodness for FOSS)

I'm really glad to read some of them are picking up on stuff like that.

Textbook case?

I'm not the first to say this but I delved a bit into the sites code and it is by far a textbook case. It's clearly work of a coder who has never done this stuff before.

First, some links call JS functions. I *hate* this. I'm talking the three lnks under the "Browse" section on the main page.

Second, regarding the links above. They initiate an ajax update of a div. What it doesn't do is tell the user that it is updating. Just now, I waited 30 seconds for the div to update. This is certainly due to slashdotting but it demonstrates poor design.

Third, again regarding the links above. All three contents update the same DIV which means the content stays stale and is now mislabeled.

Fourth, he uses a global variable to store the XMLHttpRequest/XMLHTTP object. This means you can't have multiple outstanding requests.

That's just the first page and the ajax at a cursory glance.

The visual aspects are equally appalling and it doesn't seem like it will scale at all. Right now there are 27 people who have seen The Matrix. What happens when a million people use this site. Personally, I don't care to see all million names.

I also don't get this tags movement. Mostly, why should genres be freeform? Currently there's "scifi" and there's "sci-fi". Doesn't make sense to tag with genres, characters, or people. These are all fixed things.

All that said: the site is poorly executed for what it's trying to achieve. The Wikipedia link is nice but what about IMDB? How about pulling up the WP or IMDB page in an iframe (but that's "old school", what about an innerHTML on a DIV)? Perhaps do some web service interaction with amazon and get some reference links out of it? How about web service interaction to google?

What does this site do for me? Tell me what other people watch? I don't want to know what everybody watches, I want to know what other people like me watch and recommend. I like Baseketball but I guarantee my dad doesn't so why should his tastes impact mine?

Not to rag too much on a 15 year old, but overall the site isn't slashdot worthy. But what else is new around here? All I know is that if this site was in a text book...man...that'd be one sucky book.

Ugly site, unoriginal idea

A growing service? According to Alexa it isn't even in the top 100,000 websites, and it has been going nowhere since early August.

If by a "textbook case of web 2.0 design", he means a textbook case of how not to do it, I think I can agree with him, the site is hideous!

And, of course, the fact that it is far from a new idea, everyone from Netflix to Amazon have offered collaborative filtering on movies for years.

Wipeout

the founder is only fifteen years old and created it in under a month.

And slashdot destroyed it in under 5 minutes!

movies.yahoo.com

movies.yahoo.com has been doing this for well over a year, and it's very easy and fast. The recommendations, after you've told it enough about what you like, are actually pretty spot-on.

Plus you have the added benefit of being able to link directly to where that movie is showing, the cast, plot, reviews, etc. And if you have way too much money, pay the extra fee and get your tickets from Fandango.

Of course it works with old movies just as much as new releases.

Can we please stop abusing semantics

Writing Semantic Markup: Transition to XML
from: Web 2.0 for Designers [digital-web.com] which is linked by the referenced blog,br> One of the biggest steps in realizing Web 2.0 is the transition to semantic markup, or markup that accurately describes the content its applied to. The most popular markup languages, HTML and XHTML, are used primarily for display purposes, with tags to which designers can apply styles via CSS.

It's not because somewhere in the past rss had something to do with rdf(s), w3c's first reincarnitation of a semantic web markup language, that this still is the case. The only semantics in todays rss feeds are that the entries are 'news' consisting of a title, a description and a link, everything else in there is meaningless from an explicit se;antics point of view. If the tag says dog, cat or space shuttle doesnt matter from a computer processing point of view it's all the same.
Seriously, I'm so tiered of this web 2.0 bandwagon which is most often not much more then a rehash of technology that has been out there for years but has now gotten a lot of male cow manure added to it to make it sound interesting and new.

Myspace

The interesting part about all of this is that, according to the article, the founder is only fifteen years old and created it in under a month."

Yes, and MySpace was created and founded by that nice guy called Tom.

This sounds like marketing bullcrap to me.

Mission statement

"Movietally is, simply, a collection of movies."

No it isn't. It is a collection of opinions of movies.

If you enjoyed this comment...

You may also enjoy these comments:

• Netlflix did it long time ago ... [slashdot.org]
• What exactly is so 2.0 about this? [slashdot.org]
• Web 2.0 [slashdot.org]

Re:Recommendations?

You obviously do not understand the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Web 1.0 - Only served up static content. Information. That you searched for. That you were interested in. It's all about you, you, you.

Web 2.0 - All about serving up content that someone else thinks you should be interested in. It's all about them, them, them thinking me, me, me, thinking that means you, you, you.

Web 3.0 - Profit!

KFG