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."

Comments

nothing to see there

[SilentGhost]

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

Re:nothing to see there

[jacksonj04]

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

Blog Link

[rjstanford]

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

Meh...

[Eightyford]

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?

[carpeweb]

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

[isaacklinger]

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?

[DerekLyons]

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?

[kfg]

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?

[lxt]

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?

[BrynM]

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 shows that their programmers don't really give a care what HTML is and how relates to W2.0 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?

[MaliciousSmurf]

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

Textbook case?

[MasterC]

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.