Yahoo has come out with a new service to recommend movies to you based on your history of movie ratings. The recommendations are powered by ChoiceStream, and so far I haven’t been all that impressed because they only show new releases in theatres and on DVD. What I was hoping for was a list of movies that I haven’t seen (according to my ratings) no matter when it was released.
However, the service is marked Beta (which opens another can of worms), so I’m cutting it some slack at this point.
I made that suggestion to them in a feedback survey so we’ll see if they listen to it. The fun part of it for me has been the ability to rate movies so easily. I’ve already rated over 150 movies because it’s so much fun. You don’t even have to reload the page to rate a movie, it just pops up with letter grades A-F (with pluses and minuses) and you just select one, and voila, you’re done.
I’ve meant to keep track of movies I liked and rate them, and this now lets me do that so easily that I do it for fun. I do have a complaint though (which I also voiced in the survey) that they keep showing movies (over and over again) that I haven’t seen and there’s no way to say I haven’t seen it yet, but I may be interested in seeing it. They only have ‘Not interested’ or a link to rate it. My suggestion was to have a ‘haven’t seen but might like to’ option (or something along those lines) and then have a section where you can enter recently viewed movies that you could rate, so if I haven’t seen one of those movies, and I finally see it, I can pull it up and rate it easily.
What I like about it is it’s like having my own movie review site that I can use to refer others to movies, or even rent again if it was a good one.
I have a lot of classic movies in my profile and it did suggest a few classics for me, like “Singing in the Rain” and “Men in Black” under the movies-on TV section.
Both Amazon and Netflix have services like these and I came to a similar conclusion that I don’t mind providing feedback if it’s simple and quick.
For those movies that you haven’t seen but might like to, add them to a list. They have a link “Add to List” under the movie title which allows you to add that movie to any list you want to create. Then you can mark the movie “not interested” so it doesn’t show up anymore. I think it would be cool if you could do that in one operation though.