Movietally and Understanding Web 2.0 Design

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Movietally and Understanding Web 2.0 Design

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday September 23, 2006 @08:32AM from the tally-em-eup dept.

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."

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Re:Blog Link by rjstanford · 2006-09-23 08:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

My mistake. The link to the article wasn't in the sentence, "Ajit Jaokar over at the Open Gardens blog has an article up on a growing service called movietally." it was on the phrase tag the movies they've seen in the sentence, "The service allows users to tag the movies they've seen and receive automatic recommendations for movies they might like to see."

Silly me.

And /. wonders why I don't bother to subscribe...

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You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by carpeweb · 2006-09-23 08:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?
1. Re:What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by rjstanford · 2006-09-23 09:02 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I dunno... doing the same thing that other people have done, but with blog-pr and rounded corners? Sounds pretty much like web 2.0 to me...
  
  --
  You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
2. Re:What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by carpeweb · 2006-09-23 09:50 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I wasn't criticizing movietally; I was just asking what's so new/2.0 about it. I'm not sure your post answers that. Of the features you mention, which of them really required or at least significantly benefitted from 2.0? Which was truly unique or innovative?
3. Re:What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by thrashaholic · 2006-09-23 17:51 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Do they allow you to live-search your movie collection?
  
  Why would I go to a website to "live-search" my movie collection when my DVDs are on a shelf three feet away from me ?
  
  --
  militant gun owning 'liberal'
4. Re:What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by cyberon22 · 2006-09-23 19:16 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I think Anonymous Coward is right, actually. Amazon and Netflick are all about building communities around a commercial service (shopping or renting). The gravity centers of those sites hinge on consumption. This seems to be more of just a place just to keep virtual track of the films you've seen and build connections to others based on your shared experiences with those films.
  
  I actually agree with a lot of the parent posts that this sort of thing is not necessarily that difficult to create. And if this guy wants the site to scale he is going to need SOME sort of revenue model and building business models online is NOT easy without capital. But it is a cool idea and power to him for trying. I'll create an account anyway.
5. Re:What exactly is so 2.0 about this? by carpeweb · 2006-09-24 02:15 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Again, I wasn't criticizing movietally at all, just wondering what was particularly relevant to web 2.0. I agree that the concept differs from Netflix, Amazon, etc., but I was talking about whether the functionality was substantially different and -- more importantly -- whether the functionality was somehow easier to build with 2.0 than in the "old days". (I certainly wasn't saying that this was easy.) The only reason I brought up examples was to point out that similar functionality has existed for a long time, which makes me wonder what any of this has to do with web 2.0 (and whether web 2.0 is anything significant at all).
Does it really work? by DerekLyons · 2006-09-23 09:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:Recommendations? by kfg · 2006-09-23 09:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

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
Textbook case? Of what? by lxt · 2006-09-23 09:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Textbook case? Of what? by Chapter80 · 2006-09-24 02:00 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I had no idea what a tagging system was (and plenty of people don't)
  Agreed. Most taggers on slashdot don't seem to have a clue, and like to use it as a way to add an editorial comment. Like tagging something "yes", "no", "maybe", "slownewsday" or "duh". Worthless. Do you think anyone's ever going to come back and search for all articles with the tag "yes"?
Re:nothing to see there by jacksonj04 · 2006-09-23 09:51 · Score: 3, Insightful

Old enough to be able to Google for a very similar concept and find Flixter.

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How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
The important point... by traindirector · 2006-09-23 10:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
1. Re:The important point... by daviddennis · 2006-09-23 12:01 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I'm building a pseudo Web 2.0(*) site right now, and I wanted to use a modern, CSS-based liquid layout. So I bought a book, and dove in.
  
  There are a lot of confusing workarounds needed to make a pure CSS layout work. In particular, it's extremely difficult to make table cells fill with color for the entire column instead of having the color end at the end of the content, producing a very strange effect. The best workaround seems to be to create a colored image the width of the table, with different colors for the various columns, but that requires fixed-width content, which I really don't like because I (personally!) use lots of different computers and monitors, and want the layout to reform to fit my present screen width.
  
  Worse yet, it requires that I create these images, and I wanted users to be able to design and build their own themes, like myspace. While some think myspace is badly done and distasteful, I saw and liked the crazy creativitiy it had, and wanted to see the same energy start on my own site. (I have some ideas, which I won't reveal here, for encouraging people to use readable color schemes :-) ).
  
  After hours and hours of trying to get it to work, I fell back to tables and had the whole thing working in 15 minutes.
  
  It seems like CSS does OK for fixed layouts but if you want to have a 200 pixel left sidebar and leave the rest of the page for content, I just can't figure out how to do it and have it look as nice as a simple table-driven layout.
  
  Worse, after playing around with it I could not see where the advantages were over tables. Tables work, they don't take long to code up, and I feel I understand them completely with minimal effort. It seems like with a CSS layout, you waste a lot of time fighting bizarre browser compatibilty issues, while if you use tables, they "just work", far as I can tell -- and I've tested in IE, Safari, FireFox and a few others.
  
  So far, then, for me the advantages of tables far outweigh whatever advantages CSS has, which seem like they are more based on abstract principle than on the ground reality.
  
  D
  
  (*) As others have mentioned, Web 2.0 sites blend together so easily I can't tell them apart and certainly won't remember one to the point where it stands out. I've decided to try a middle path between observing conventions and slavish conformance to the norm. So my site is quite different from what else is out there. However, I'm still working on some last-minute details and so I'm not ready to have it sig-slashdotted yet.
Not exactly new by ephemeraleuphoria · 2006-09-23 11:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Besides the non web-2.0 versions at Amazon/NetFlix/the like, Spout 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.

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michael greene
More irrational exhuberance by VoiceOfReason · 2006-09-23 11:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

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/ or any of a number of movie recommendation sites that will give you better results w/o all the Web 2.0 hype.
Textbook case? by MasterC · 2006-09-23 14:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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:wq
Mission statement by Anonymous Coward · 2006-09-24 06:50 · Score: 1, Insightful

"Movietally is, simply, a collection of movies."
No it isn't. It is a collection of opinions of movies.