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IMDb Hits 25
An anonymous reader writes: The year 2015 heralded a number of notable Internet milestones — the humble .com domain name reached 30 years of age, while both eBay and Amazon reached the grand old age of 20. That the Internet Movie Database, a gargantuan film and TV show encyclopedia better known as IMDb, began 25 years ago as a pre-Web hobby project and is now one of the top 50 most visited websites on the Internet is a notable achievement. "IMDb is the only pure Internet company that can celebrate its 25th anniversary," said Col Needham, founder and CEO of IMDb, in an interview with VentureBeat.
and my Grandmother still argues about it.
There are a lot of things that started offline, moved online, and are still going strong after decades.
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences comes to mind. Neil Sloane started that 50 years ago.
Not sure what the definition of 'pure Internet company' might be in this context, but IMDb has been owned outright by Amazon since the late '90s, so at best, it's a 'pure Internet subsidiary' ...
Is a pure, raw, unfiltered, unadulterated internet company. Its budget was born in the red and was a black hole for VC funds. Nobody knows what it did, does, or is supposed to do. Its mission statement - you just read it! I think it's just a landing page....
Wait, Humble Bundle? Oh, well, that's different then! ... ...
Never mind!
Happy birthday IMDB! You've done more than any other site on the internet to convince me of the necessity of ad-blocking! Those HUGE banners above everything else, especially when they are the last thing to load and make the page move while I'm trying to click on the search bar but instead get taken elsewhere. The nice blurring of the line between just listing what's new, and giving huge extra amounts of intrusive space to movies that are paying you for clicks... And let's not even get started on locking-up content behind a paid service that was previously freely available (and still available on other sites). Or the Yahoo/Amazon-esque cramming more crap into every page, or spreading the content across dozens more pages, so that it takes 4 extra clicks to look-up the basic info nearly everybody visiting your site is looking for...
No other site makes me curse for needing to use it like you do, IMDB. So happy birthday...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I seem to remember IMDb started on Usenet in the 80s.
I didn't realize IMDB was that old. I remember getting a CD of Microsoft Cinemania in 1994, which was the best reference that I knew of for movies at the time. I think they came out with a new one yearly, but Internet databases such as IMDB could be updated easier and more frequently so they stopped publishing Cinemania.
for proving that you're spoiled children that know nothing about the Internet. Usenet is most certainly online. Marking this guy as a troll is ridiculous.
The most useful movie reviews look something like this:
V: 9
A: 9
M: 8
You are welcome on my lawn.
... because the reviews and user ratings are very obviously being spammed by marketing firms. 10 years ago you could almost trust an IMDB rating, today every second movie that comes out immediately pops up into the top 250 with raving reviews.
I've been using IMDB forever. I still use it several times a day. I do have some nits to pick though:
I have started to notice lately, a lot of images for actors are missing.
I think I would like it if the image for the actor in the movie link was one from the movie, not one 40 years later. Much of the time
there are images in the photos (if there are any) of the actor in the movie I'm looking at.
Lastly, there seems to be some real issues with most foreign (non-Hollywood) movies.
Frequently there is no detailed plot summary, rating, and actors links seem to be missing.
Looking movie names up in their original language sometimes doesn't work at all.
That's my whine, happy birthday IMDB.
Wikipedia is the first thing that came to my mind when thinking of a non-exploitative alternative to IMDB. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has "notability" guidelines that are often poorly implemented. An article about an obscure indie movie has better chances of not getting deleted in IMDB.
Maybe the most famous company, but my company has been around as long as the internet, so arguably it may even be older by a month or two. Bold statements don't always make them true.
25 years, and still no support for HTTPS (sure the home page shows, but any search gives an error). "Soon" must mean another 25 years.
I use IMDB mostly to pick out movies to watch based on user ratings. But I've noticed that in the past 10 years, there's been a divergence in IMDB ratings and my ratings. Anyone else notice this? Some movies rated 8 are total crap. 10 years ago, every movie rated 8 or above was guaranteed to be a great movie. Maybe my tastes have changed, but i feel the voters have changed. My theory is that IMDB is more popular, and now the people who vote on it are just the average person, not computer nerds like me.
...have barely advanced beyond the age of three.
Although I am willing to allow 25-year-old monkeys flinging poo as an alternative.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
When it was at Cardiff University, I helped out for free as did many other people around the internet at the time. It was then taken commercial without any notice or recompense, with really quite sketchy and dubious claims of ownership, and it was quite a controversy at the time. I have still not forgotten it, and a lesson was learned that day.
Here's a clip about the IMDb when it was hosted at Cardiff Uni, which gives you an idea of how it looked like at the time. It's from a BBC Wales programme that was explaining this new-fangled World Wide Web thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZiGaOD9l7g
Lately it has been blocking me with a sign up for IMDb Pro. I guess its usefulness is ending. Happy Birthday!
must be getting old. /. (long ago) where the imdb founder said in an interview that he would love to have a site like slashdot. not so sure that he still feels this way now though.
i remember a post on
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.