Quick Pitch: Filmaster is a social network for film buffs that features personalized content and recommendations via algorithms.
Genius Idea: While there are many websites focused on film, (i.e. IMDB, MakingOf, Jinni), few combine social networking and movie recommendations like Filmaster does. It's a place to blog about movies and make friends, but at its core Filmaster is a movie discovery engine.
Filmaster is divided into four primary sections: ratings, "the planet," forum, and profile. Ratings is the one where you engage with films the most. As you might expect, you have the opportunity to rate different films - on a scale of 1-10 - as well as grade aspects like direction, screenplay, and more. The nice aspect, though, is its StumbleUpon-like feature. After rating a movie, you can stumble into a new movie and rate it, read ratings, or post your own review.
This process is important because you need enough ratings to generate a good list of movies that Filmaster recommends, based on your preferences and tastes. This is a lot like a similar competitor, Jinni. The recommendations are based mostly on how you rate and review movies - an algorithm takes care of the rest.
All of Filmaster's other features are social in nature. The Planet is essentially a global newsfeed of user comments and reviews, while the profile system makes it easy to start following the comment and reviews of someone that piques your interest. You can also filter friends based on common tastes and create movie wishlists.
Filmasters does need some interface work. Especially, the system needs to tell you how many movies you need to rate until it can produce recommendations. Yet while it does need a bit of work, the overall design is innovative and the information on the site is useful. Is it better than Jinni? No, not yet, but by combining strong social features with recommendations, it could have a shot.
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