TwitCritics: A Twitter Movie Reviewer
November 13th, 2009Posted by: J.W. Crump Posted in Blogs, Mainstream Media, Twitter, Web 2.0
I absolutely love movies; I probably go see every single one that comes out in theaters (and yes, that includes such gems as Stepfather). I was excited to see a Twitter application come out that proposed the idea that it could tally a movie review total from tweets. It’s called TwitCritics.
We already have plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to movie reviews, so why use this? Well, I like to think that most Twitter users would immediately tweet about whether or not they liked a movie they just saw. Think of this not so much a review summary, but a ‘first impression’ summary. The system searches for tweets that include a movie title, and then assigns a tonality based on the content of the tweet. A handy ‘mistake’ button is present under each individual tweet to ensure that users can report a faulty rating.
Does it work? Not completely. Its success is on a movie-by-movie basis. Some films that have unique names such as The Men Who Stare at Goats and the tweets for that film are easily recognizable. Other films such as Fame suffer the issue of having a common word for its title.
Most of the tweets were not actually about the movie but were still rated in the system and part of the film’s overall tonality. Often, tweets about an actual film were still not rated correctly. A prime example is below:
Currently, the system doesn’t seem to account for popular acronyms for longer movie titles (such as TMWSAG).
The website is still in its infancy with the Beta only about a month old. Hopefully, they will find a way to work some of the kinks out. It doesn’t really subsist as a standalone product, but I could easily see something like this incorporated into a more robust site like Rotten Tomatoes.
