TweetCritics Brings Us Real Time Movie Ratings

By Kevin Coll • October 22, 2009 • 1 Comment

So my blog buddies at FirstShowing and Slashfilm both posted stories on this interesting twitter story and I thought I would way in on it. The Twitter craze is among us, its becoming more than a fad and a major part of culture and society. Where else can you really find out what the CEO of company thinks or have a small glimpse of what Ashton Kutcher’s life is like? People today admist all the instant gratification needs want to feel more connected to everyone. The staying power of the site is still up in the air as their retention rate is not as high as MySpace or Facebook’s was by this stage in the development. The thing is Twitter’s development is a lot different than any other social media site before it. It assumes the need to connect is already there and relies on other various social technologies to integrate itself into that existing popular social media like Facebook and MySpace.

Our website traffic surely benefits from the technology, i.e. – a post goes to twitter, which is also connected to our Facebook, posts go there too. Our commenting system is linked to twitter as well. I think the staying power of the brand is becoming increasingly larger and that is due to the movement of realtime interactions such as contests, live tweeting events for popular TV shows, hashtagging to globalize a discussion. Those are just small examples of the usefulness of the site.

Now RottenTomatoes is getting some Twitter competition. TwitCritics (twitcritics.com) capitalizes on the Twitter craze, compiling reviews of movies and giving an average rating, like Rotten Tomatoes based on user feedback tweets on the latest films.

Question: How does the program know what the person said is legit? It could be a mistake comment or spam? The site does have a simple system for making corrections. There’s a “mistake” link under the “thumbs up/down” which allows you to correct the tweet if it’s wrong, spam, or not even a critique at all. At this point we speculate this correction goes through an administrative approval system moderated by a real person, so the system can’t be tipped.

Collective ratings systems have become increasingly popular among moviegoers as they combine RottenTomatoes, MetaCritic with reviews from their favorite blogs (FusedFilm, Chud) to really make that decision to throw out that 10 bucks on Friday night for the movie they want to see or should see. Now TwitCritics adds itself to the mix but allows the masses to help that decision making rather than the select reviewers from news outlets all across the country based on the lame rules for being included on RottenTomatoes or MetaCritic.

Social media is always about people, its the groundswell – “the social revolution where people use technologies to get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations” - their desire to connect, new interactive technologies (Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Digg, etc) have created this revolution, this is the era of The Groundswell and that is what makes TwitCritic so intriguing.

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