Flixster, Movie Reviews and Social Networking Sites
Writing movie reviews is something I enjoy doing, at least in my own format on EsoBlog. I tend to be a bit wordy in my assessments, though generally not as picky as some move watchers. My list of good movies is about ten times bigger than my list of bad movies - well, mostly because I avoid watching movies I don't think I will like!
At any rate, I've thought on and off about joining some movie review site but have never done it until now. I finally joined Flixster. I wish there was a site where you could embed reviews from your own web site or external source, or at least provide a list of links or something. I haven't look deep enough into Flixster to see what sort of API or scriptability and linking it offers. I see it has some widgets you can embed elsewhere, and I'll probably eventually put one of those on Esotropiart somewhere.
For now, here's a link to the simple profile I created on Flixster:
A "Movie Wall" created by one of the Flixster widgets:
Please feel free to add me as your friend on Flixster if you already have a free account. If I know you, you seem like a decent person, or I share interests, I'll probably add you back. However, I'm probably not going to be spending ridiculous amounts of time on there, so check back here on Esotropiart if you are really interested in what I have to say (ha, yea, right!).
One of the things I think that is REALLY STUPID about Flixster is that data is not spread throughout one's profile, lists, widgets, etc. For example, there is a text-based list of favorite movies, actors and so on for the main profile page. You have to type these, there is no way to grab the information you already created in the lists sections. To create the above widget, I had to remember what order I already spent time creating the lists for favorite movies and actors because the widget creator also does not pull from your already built lists. It is the lamest thing I've ever seen, and I would expect better from such a famous site.
I've also noticed that Flixster widgets that utilize Adobe Flash technology make use of the <embed> HTML tag, which is bad. It's not W3C standards-compliant within somewhat modern XHTML coding practices, and isn't really the best way to do things. I'll probably try to find a better way, like using the SWFObject by deconcept. The problem is that I'll have to look at Flixster's widgets in-depth to see if it's possible to convert all their variables and such so it will work with the Javascript-based SWFObject.
I'm not really interested in maintaining much on these social networking sites because it requires double the work that I already do. It takes me a long time to write material for my own web site. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flixster, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. take massive time to maintain and make worthwhile. While I have accounts on some of these sites and others, I don't do much with them.
What most people don't realize is that by spending all this time on these social networking sites, they are simply making money for the already super rich. I'm not particularly interested in making money with my own web site, it's more of a personal expression and hobby. However, I would like to get more traffic from like-minded people. The best way to do this is to have a site with good content. Also important is to develop links to your site from sources that are likely to build traffic related to your interests. This is the part I don't like investing in. However, I'm willing to put a little effort into the ones that allow some sort of connection with my site - since that's ultimately where I want the visitors to come.
I just tied in my Flixster account into my Facebook account. Whoopie. Now 2 sites that I don't use much are all synced up!