Community Reviews and Ratings

[lcorneliussen]

I would love the view to show community ratings and also reviews from IMDB, Amazon & Co.

[Conor]

It shows the ratings for the original site from where the information came from. Thank you for the suggestions. Adding a command to view more ratings and reviews from several sites sounds like a good idea. It is something we can try to incorporate for the next major version.

[sitenoise]

Speaking of something akin to this ... is it feasible to think of syncing to accounts that you may have at various online sources like IMDb, Amazon, NetFlix, or Flixster? So that ratings and reviews you post there would sync up to your dvdpedia world ... and then when you export your collection for the web so all your friends can visit it for recommendations, (or Roger Ebert stops by to check out the competition ) your comments and rating are built in! And then have connected links to those places so that the friend can read more about it, buy it, rent it, or watch it online depending on their mood and the movie's availability, Wow!

ps - every time I start thinking like this I recognize that you've built DVD collection software, but you did it in such a way that it comes off like so much more so I often forget what the focus is ...

[Conor]

We appreciate the feedback no matter how off our main focus it might be. It opens new routes and gives us ideas for future development. DVDpedia is so flexible that it's possible to drag each webpage that you post a review on to your DVDpedia movie and create a link. This way when you export your collection you can include the links directly to all those other reviews you have written at other sites or found useful. Since you have to do this yourself the idea of automatic integration is a good one. You wouldn't have to remember to link the reviews and DVDpedia would become a hub to managing and keeping track of all those reviews. Newer sites tend to have API's that make all this integration possible but older sites are still updating, the bigger you are the harder it is to change. The exception, of course, is Amazon that has done a great job with their API and is always improving it, the reason they are the main player. They actually do include ways to download all the reviews for a user so we will definitely take a serious look at including your suggestion with Amazon for our next major update. From there we can add other websites as they update and make it possible to integrate with them.

[sitenoise]

... drag each webpage that you post a review on to your DVDpedia movie and create a link. This way when you export your collection you can include the links directly to all those other reviews ....

I know about the dragging part, but not the including part. I assume it's all or nothing by putting the <!--IFLinks ... in your export. So what would that do with the link to the local movie file you have in there when it's up on the web?

And as a aside, I will say that Amazon is second only to Yahoo (because there's doesn't even work) when it comes to frustrating in the review department. There's no way to know which ones are accepted or rejected or why. You send a follow up email to community help that's seldom answered and maybe the review will show up without a response. I've never had one rejected but the whole process is a pain in the rump. And if you want to edit, you just have to do the process all over again, they don't really have the concept of updating. They don't allow any html or formatting ... which i understand, but they're still a little too controlling. (They edited the phrase "kick-ass" out of one of my reviews). I understand, and respect, the notion of community standards that Amazon and IMDb want to enforce, to a degree, and would only like to suggest sites like Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, because they employ the paradigm of a personal journal, as alternatives here.

Flixster is kind of a silly, anarchic site but they are one of the web 2.0 new sites that offers a lot of flexibility and seem pretty rich in the API department. Are you familiar with their site?

[Conor]

We hadn't heard of Flixster. It's an interesting site with a good core concept. It's a bit in disarray, it still seems to be trying to figure out how to bring all it's functionality together but thank you for pointing it out.

When exporting links the program strips out the local links from the export. Unless you add <meta name="includeLocalLinks" content="yes" /> to the template file, in which case it copies the local link files to a folder inside the export and links to there. This is great with small files like text, web pages or PDFs. I would be careful with larger media as you would have to upload all that information.

When I was speaking of Amazon being first I was referring to their ubiquity on the internet. I believe it's due to their great API, that lets developers integrate so well with it, be it for reviews or other things like price comparisons. As you mention on the customer side, they have areas they can improve. Their community reviews will never be as good as RottenTomatoes, unlike those sites it's not their main interest. At the end of the day Amazon aims is to sell more.

[sitenoise]

We hadn't heard of Flixster. It's an interesting site with a good core concept. It's a bit in disarray, ...

Yeah, some of it is laughably bad, like a film might be in their db twice, once with the original title and once with the english title. The only thing i like about it is it seems to be the easiest and best place to make lists and share them. They do seem to have rich, contemporary API's as they are pretty much built into Facebook and mySpace (I think).

When exporting links the program strips out the local links from the export. Unless you add <meta name="includeLocalLinks" content="yes" /> to the template file, in which case it copies the local link files to a folder inside the export and links to there.

It would be super swell if there was a way to pick and choose which links get exported, although i can't think of how you might do that, except maybe by domain or something, (or by having two separate "links" areas) but I have numerous links in my dvdpedia entries, many of which i wouldn't want exported, but some I would. I mean, I'd like to have links to reviews I've written, to Netflix, Amazon, IMDb, you know, places to get or watch the movie, but not to every link that I keep in my reference pile. I guess the only angle into this I can see ... and since we already have Amazon and IMDb ... would be adding Netflix and then perhaps if you ,or the supply-side-API's let you, grab info that's part of an account you have somewhere.

I will just add that I add a Google site search link for Netflix to my exports because my friends love to be able to immediately click to Netflix if they like the movie I'm talking about. Any plans for Netflix?

[Conor]

We do want to add support for NetFlix. We been waiting for an API from NetFlix so that we can add more than search, such as having your queue from NetFlix show up as a collection in your DVDpedia, where you can arrange it, rate seen movies and take advantage of displaying recommendation that NetFlix is so good at. A lot of NetFlix user have been requesting this ability so we are hoping NetFlix will consider adding this feature. It would make them more attractive to smaller projects such as DVDpedia and allow them to compete with all the new streaming services from Apple, Microsoft and Sony.