The Movie Tracker joins crowded movie recommendation space

Movie-recommendation startup The Movie Tracker launched recently, adding to a crowded recommendation and social media space that includes TasteKid, The Auteurs, Trusted Opinion, Jinni, Flixster, and of course Netflix, among others. The site is still working out some of its bugs, but here’s how it works: You sign in and select at least 5 movies you’ve watched — the more you select, the more the service’s algorithm will have more to work with — and it will give you recommendations based on that information.

Upon signing up, I received a “Newbie Badge,” although I’m not really sure what I do with it. The site enables Facebook Connect functionality and helps you fill in the title of the movie. After I selected the 5 movies to add to “My Movie Log” — most of them recent releases — I received a selection of 20 movies, most of them fairly older. Maybe it thought I should be exposed to more than movies released in the last 6 months? Within the recommended movies, you have the option to add them to the list of movies you’ve seen, to a list you’ve created, or to one of those provided by The Movie Tracker, such as “Best Movies” or “Worst Movies.” Each movie the engine suggests also has a short description when you click on it. Most of these plot summaries have been manually created from Wikipedia or another online source. The Movie Tracker has cataloged 15,000 movies thus far.

The company was founded in October 2009 by husband and wife team Brian Hoffman and Shirin Aminifar. After not being able to find a deep enough experience on Netflix, they decided to create their own site and make it more social, with ratings and suggestions. And they eventually added geolocation information such as whether a user has watched a movie online or at a movie theater. All of this information is then used to create additional recommendations. Each movie is tagged with up to 150 tags, including genre, rating, and plot themes, and user profiles are filtered based on when they watched movies, how long ago they watched a movie, the timing between watching movies, and the number of times they watched a certain movie, amongst other things. Of course, users have to enter most of this data manually, and I decided to skip that part, not sure that the additional data would enrich my recommendations much.

As it’s still early, The Movie Tracker’s user numbers are only in the hundreds, and Hoffman and Aminifar haven’t paid much attention to marketing the site. The goal, according to Hoffman, is to get a critical mass using the tools on the site and get them completing activities on the site, rather than focusing on purely growing audience size. They would like to have 100,000-150,000 tracked movies (those users are recording in their logs), said Hoffman. Users are able to rate movies as well as see discussions around those movies that are happening on Twitter. The company has partnered with AMC, Regal, and National Amusements to sell discounted theater passes on the site and are looking at additional partnerships around content discounts.

At this point, the site is not developed enough for it to break out of the pack. It’s more of a catalog of movies a user has watched or would like to watch. I’m not convinced there needs to be a whole site around this functionality. In addition, sites, such as The Auteurs, which is focused on independent films, and Jinni let you watch movies directly from the site or connect to Netflix or other services to watch a movie. That immediacy makes those services more robust than one simply suggesting more movies to watch, which you then have to find somewhere else.

Hoffman believes The Movie Tracker’s differentiator is a greater level of interactivity and the automated suggestions it offers, but this is nothing new. And without additional features, I don’t see reason for users to choose The Movie Tracker over another service. The site does have a Virtual Badge system, which lets users collect badges based on the number of movies they enter (in addition to the Newbie Badge, there are badges for watching 10, 25, and 50 movies) or the frequency of movie watching (for example, watching a movie three nights in a row or watching the same movie 10 times). Badges are the hot new thing, but just having a badge in and of itself doesn’t make the experience more engaging. The badges do earn users points, though, and The Movie Tracker plans to launch a leaderboard, the winner of which would win free movie tickets, said Hoffman, which may make users more likely to compete. Still, I’m not sure the prize would be worth the effort.

The Movie Tracker is headquartered in Fairfax, VA and is currently self-funded.

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