Jinni

So the other day I was watching Poolhall Junkies for what must be the 6th time and I was thinking to myself, what a great movie, there must be plenty other great movies around that I don't know about, how will I ever find them.

After watching Sherlock Holmes last night I had an idea that almost seemed too obvious, there must be websites like Last.fm for movies. For those of you who don't know what Last.fm is, let me enlighten you.

Last fm is a music service that learns what you love
Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.
...and as you use Last.fm you make it better for you and everyone else.
When you recommend some music to a friend, or you tag it, or you write about it - even just listening to it - you shift the song's importance on the site. It'll be recommended to different people, because you've listened to it. It'll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good. [source Last.fm about]

to quickly summarise if that doesn't make sense, you download a little application from their website which acts like a plug in to your music player of choice (itunes/wmp/winamp/etc..) and every song you play is added to your profile (not the actual file, just the metadata), and from this it can make recommendations for you based on what you've listened to. In a simplistic way I guess it works something like this, 500 people listen to Rise Against and Alkaline Trio, somebody who listens to Alkaline Trio will get Rise Against recommended to them. It's obviously a lot more complicated and factors in a lot of other variables but that's the basic idea (iTunes Genius is similar). So the more you listen to music, the more it learns about what music you may like and at the same time enables better recommendations for other people. Last.fm is also pretty cool for just giving you graphs of what you've been listening to, but back to what I was saying.

So last night I decided to look for a website like last.fm for movies and I cam across Jinni.com and it's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Obviously it doesn't upload movies you like automatically, but it does give you some better options. Say I like Fight Club, I can search for it, rank it from 0 -10 and mark it is a "favourite". After doing a couple of these it will recommend movies I would probably like. As you can guess, the more users and the more movies they rate, the better results will be. I'm not too sure how new the website is, or how many members there are at the moment, but either way, more = better. As with last.fm, it's a lot more complicated than, you like fight movies, you must like all fighting movies. To fully understand the depth of it you would be best reading The Movie Genome on their website.

I'm too lazy to read over that last paragraph so I hope it makes sense, anyways, sign up, add movies!