Social Recommendation Site for Movies

June 22nd, 2007 | Movie Recommendations and Reviews

I stumble upon a site MovieLens developed by folks at University of Minnesota. It was a cool site and instantly I liked the movie.

For movies, I used to visit only IMDb (of course) and Rotten Tomatoes before. Now I’ll start to use this site as well.

‘What movie should I watch?’

I’m going to tell the two biggest reasons why I like MovieLens and you might want to check it out:

Getting recommendations

This is all the site is about, give recommendation. MovieLens has shortcuts like Top Picks For You that provide you with quick access to common searches. You can use the Search tab to perform more advanced searches that filter by genre, date and save your favorite searches as personal shortcuts.

When you enter a movie, it recommends you a list of similar movie that you might like. Before you log in, you can try this feature (shown in the image below)

Tags

You can search movies by tags, add tags to movies, etc.. You can apply tags to create customized lists of movies. You can also rate tags which are associated for a particular movie. See the tags associated with for the movie The Shawshank Redemption:

More Bells and Whistles

There’s a lot more that I like. Here’s a quick look:

1. My movie ratings. I have a similar page here : Movie Review where I rate all the movies. I also rate at IMDb as well. One thing that I like is I can make my movie ratings public with RSS feeds for the same as well. [I might not be that be actively rating movies there, but you guys are interested in my movie ratings feeds let me know, I’ll rate every other movie I see.]

2. My wish list. I can mark movies that I want to see. Useful if you want to keep track of the thing you want to download. You can also print this and take to your video rental store.

3. Stats. I can analyze for which movies my rating is above or below the average ratings. We can also see graphs of our ratings by genres or average ratings for a particular genre. See this image, give an idea about the movies genres I tend to like:

4. Recent Movies and DVDs. A list of recently released movies and DVDs greets you in the home page.

Recent Movies and DVDs

5. Movie buddies. I’m in the Snake Group (based on my movie preferences). So you can get connected with like minded users and get to see our-kind-of-movies.

Some of things are Ajaxfied, the site is fairly fast. But the design has to be improved vastly. I found it very cool tool for movie buffs, but the it might fizz out after some time when we’ve already watched a lot of movies. Try it and let me know if you liked it.

MovieLens is very addictive. I spend more than 70 minutes in this site just when I visited for the first time and rated over 115 movies in these 2 days!

Maybe it’s the next best thing other than watching movies!