Moviecritic Reincarnated

There used to be this awesome site called moviecritic.com - you'd rank movies and it would predict what movies you'd like. It would recommend me weird movies like Cold Blooded with Jason Priestly - and it would turn out I actually liked them. Moviecritic shut down. I was sad. I joined Netflix because they had something similar, but it never worked as well for me, and my ratings were corrupted by my wife's ratings.

But now there is http://movielens.org. It's a non-profit, so hopefully it won't get shut down in a couple years. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work quite as well as moviecritic yet. Although for the most part its predictions match my opinions, it's still recommending me movies I've already seen and didn't like, and it has yet to realize that I consider Naked Lunch and Videodrome cinematic masterpieces.

I figure the problem is it doesn't have enough data to work with yet. The site is only getting 30 hits an hour or so - apparently not enough people know about it.

This is where you come in. You must go to that site, and rate a ton of movies, and give them better data to work with. Go! The fate of humanity depends on it.

Comments

[Despayre]

Mmm...as addictive as crack, without the harmful side effects (except possibly lost work time)

Good news is that its for a college research project, so it should be around for a few years at least..hopefully they will continue it, but if nothing else it could lead to some interesting results for search algorithms being used by similar sites like netflix.

[Markus Friedl]

there is also this...

whattorent

worth checking out I think

[Markus Friedl]

sorry... I should use the preview feature more...

www.whattorent.com

[Jamie Fristrom]

This'll be a good test: whattorent suggests *Way of the Gun* - movielens says I won't like it. We'll see.

[Markus Friedl]

any test results already Jamie?

[Jeffool]

Yeah, I'm curious. I liked Way Of The Gun.

[tj]

Try MoviePig - http://www.moviepig.com

The original patent holder for LikeMinds, the predictive engine behind MovieCritic, has redeployed his love of movies and user communities in a new rating interface.

FYI, MovieCritic was finally taken down in the Spring of 2001 when Macromedia sold the LikeMinds software to IBM. Being both too stupid and unimaginative to pay the extra $20,000 or so it would have cost them to take the entire MoveCritic system, including existing accounts, history, and past transactions, IBM decided to merely "mock" the original and port the MovieCritic demo to WebSpehere under the highly imaginative name of MovieSite.

If anyone required more evidence why IBM blows at everything they do, witness the MovieSite demo being integrated into IBM's feeble Content Publishing tool, later intgrated into WebSphere Portal Server, to be marketed with a straight face to customers worldwide under the moniker WPCP.

When I laughingly referred to the entire suite as "dustware", for among other things its install requiring 82-CD's and the fabulously naive and infamous inabilty to import large repositories of content and instead deciding its largest customers wouldn't mind re-keying millions of documents into WPCP by hand, everyone on the management team looked at me with the blank bovine stares of cattle that have been caged within eyesight of real grass for years but not allowed to graze.

In fairness, IBM and Macromedia actually teamed up to "kill -9" MovieCritic, the latter screwing it up when they insisted it come out from behind the Andromedia, Inc. firewall where it had done yeoman's service for years and be deployed, via corporate policy, behind the Macromedia DMZ/Firewall, a move which got it hacked and nearly infiltrated within hours of the move.

The access went steadily downhill after that, April 2001 or so, and then then final software deal for LikeMinds later that year with IBM finished it off in July of 2001.

I was contractually constrained from taking the transactions with me so instead the entire MoveiCritic dB was sacrificed to the vagaries of entropy and deemd to be better off having its electrons scattered into the void than preserved on a few CD's worth of backup!

Ah, corporate America. Don'cha just love it?

tV

[Huckfinster]

Nice burn on IBM and general corporate stupidity (such ripe hunting ground!)

Have been waiting for the collaborative filting concept to get mainstream, thanks for the background on what was evidently a well loved site.
will check out moviepig.com

[Jamie Fristrom]

I'm liking moviepig. Seems fairly accurate so far. Wish it went back further in time.

[Jeffool]

So, did you like Way of the Gun? I mean, that last gunfight was just good stuff.

[Jamie Fristrom]

Sure. I'd give it 3 and a half stars.

[tm]

So, that's what happened to Moviecritic.com! I loved that site. Stopped using it for a year or so, then couldn't find it again. Bummer. I'll try these other sites that were mentioned. Thanks for posting this.

[Andiras]

i tested all of this "new" moviecritic sites and even one more (moviepilot - a german site) and they are all crap compared to the original moviecritic.
the concept behind all the pages seems to be some kind of cluster-analysis to match the participants with a group that has a similar taste. if you use only 10 "taste groups" like movielens it might be suitable for the most users but if your taste is somehow inconsistent to the rest of the group the predictions are not very well.
for example: i hate the movies "300" and "jackie brown" but the average of my movielens group colleages ("snake group") likes them. but if the algorithm would build up a new cluster for me and the other in the "snake group" that hate jacky brown the predictions for our new group would be much better.
i know that you need a lot of people to do so - but moviecritic did it very well and as far as i remember the predictions were far above average and sometimes really astonishing. i dont experience this with the other sites.
moviepig (see above post) should work on its interface design.
yes - i know the first post is almost 4 years ago but i think the problem is still the same and google will send a lot more moviecritic-seekers to this page here ;-)

[Jamie Fristrom]

Actually, I gave up on movielens long ago, then used moviepig for a while and gave up on that too.

Netflix's built-in ratings are what I use now. They're quite accurate for me - sure, they don't rate movies in theaters, but I never see movies in theaters anymore anyway.

[movieguy]

I also long for the days of moviecritic. Nothing out there comes close. I use Netflix's ratings but they are so inferior to what moviecritic used to be able to do.

[movieguy]

I also long for the days of moviecritic. Nothing out there comes close. I use Netflix's ratings but they are so inferior to what moviecritic used to be able to do.

[Jens Aage Pedersen]

Just to say that I, too, sorely miss good ol' Moviecritic, which was for a while the single-most useful webpage around with an absolutely uncanny prediction ability. And then it was shut down...

Even though it's been quite a few years now, I find it worth keeping the legacy going. If it were ever resurrected (judging from tV's comment, I guess there's absolutely no chance of that), or just something that comes closer than the sites mentioned above, I'd love to be the first to hear about it.