Movietally and Understanding Web 2.0 Design 82
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 (Score:3, Funny)
how exactly old is he?
Re:nothing to see there (Score:4, Insightful)
Blog Link (Score:5, Informative)
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Silly me.
And
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Meh... (Score:4, Funny)
What exactly is so 2.0 about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The subject of recommendation engines seems to come up pretty regularly, and no-one ever seems to give props to RINGO->HOMR->Firefly.
I suppose no-one mentions Tapestry when they wax rhapsodic about tagging, either...but then again it didn't really work very well.
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Amazon also gives you reccomendations based on what you have tagged/purchased, based on other people's tags/purchases. They are really quite good at it, as well - pretty much everything on my reccomended items list I either already own, or plan on purchasing at some point in the future. Yes, in the end they are trying to get you to buy, but they use a bunch of the same techniques, and ar
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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
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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 ?
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Web 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
What the author of the article sees: What I see:
1. Tags
2. Large font
3. Rounded edges
4. Top-right search box
5. Prominent, two-tone, quasi-logical logo
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6) Read "Database for Dummies"
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1. Tags
Really?? What I see:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (4) in
We have encountered an error.
An error occurred while connecting to the database. Details of this error have been sent to an administrator.
Please check back later!
Go go Web 2.0!
Re:Web 2.0 - u forgot one... (Score:2)
6. Gradiant header background.
If you enjoyed this comment... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Recommendations? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Does it really work? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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<sarcasm> I mean, Immortal is tagged "Death Metal" when they are most certainly "Black Metal" !!! </sarcasm>
/me waits for proper MusicBrainz integration with patience.
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Or, how about WikiLens (Score:2)
http://www.wikilens.org/ [wikilens.org]
Textbook case? Of what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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last.fm anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Why is this interesting? (Score:2)
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 i
Really, what have you done? (Score:2)
It's not really a complex system he has set up here. But really at 15, this isn't that impressive. ... is it really far fetched that a 15 year old could do this?
Sure, anyone could have done it but he did. This guy just beat all the big studios and media companies to the punch with a simple, stand alone and useful service. That's impressive at any age. What cool ideas have you implemented? By age 15?
The onlything I don't like is his terms of service. I stopped reading where it stated that I was re
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Since I didn't like waking up before noon, I took him up on it...a couple of weeks later I had a very functional bowling league program. I showed it to the prof., of course he got "featuritus" and asked for some mor
The important point... (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.
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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
I couldn't agree more. (Score:2)
If the job gets done well, the technology was a good choice. I have programmers who start with a technology before they have a design.
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Simple? You have tags nested three deep to display two things. It is certainly a simpler mental model though. An x,y grid is easier to grasp than the layout of boxes according to floats, clears and positioning.
For a 2 col layout:
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There's your first problem. No book is going to give you all of the latest techniques for doing "cool" things with CSS. For that you need to poke around online at places like CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com], A List Apart [alistapart.com], Liquid Designs [cssliquid.com], etc. If you must buy a book, a pocket reference is the best way to go (and even that really isn't necessary, since you can find good references [w3.org] online).
Not exactly new (Score:2, Insightful)
More irrational exhuberance (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
15? no big deal. (Score:2)
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.
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As I said, gald to see the kids are doing well, more power to them.
BTW, AC, good luck on your 'snide comment carrer', really!
Textbook case? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
movies.yahoo.com (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
It's not because somewhere in the past rss had something to do with rdf(s), w3c's first reincarnita
Myspace (Score:1)
Yes, and MySpace was created and founded by that nice guy called Tom.
This sounds like marketing bullcrap to me.
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Mission statement (Score:1, Insightful)
No it isn't. It is a collection of opinions of movies.