Flixter.

You’d think Flixter, a social website focused on movies would be something I’d wait in line for. While competently executed with some stand-out features, overall there are enough things that either bother or confuse me – that I probably won’t return.

Let me start with the cool features: user-contributed movie-related ratings, reviews, and information. The functionality is well thought out, relatively easy to use, and works as described. Their movie showtime listings are noticeably speedy.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept. It’s a great idea to give people the power to rate movies they’ve seen. Everyone has an opinion and some are very passionate about sharing it with others. Empowering passionate people to communicate and connect online, forming a community around a particular subject, is the very purpose and definition of a niche social site.

What I find less appealing are the user profiles, a skin-able home page, and hot photos of actors and actresses. Flixter has a celebrity gawking, “People Magazine” gloss that’s isn’t the primary focus of my movie viewing habits – I don’t hear “Nicholas Cage! Brad Pitt!” and immediately want to experience their “vehicles.”

The actor/actress-centric site organization causes problems in my case. What if I prefer things organized by director? And I’m really not interested in hot photos of George Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola?

Second, as soon as I signed up, I was asked to enter in my Gmail and MySpace info, take a movie rating test (five pages of movies to rate!), plus choose a “skin” for my home page (of which I now have a tasteful photograph of Orlando Bloom – simply because it was more appealing than the Disney charcters) – I found this rather overwhelming.

The bottom line: Flixter reminds me of Netflix + MySpace, the latter of which is just not my scene. I can tolerate some MySpace aspects, but at Flixter, they’re are a bit too dominant for my taste.

For now, there are other movie sites that do a pretty good job of providing movie information as far as I’m concerned: IMDB, Netflix, AllMoviePhotos, Apple Trailers. If you can imagine all of these sites mashed into one with MySpace on top, that’s Flixter. Maybe I’d be more interested in a toned-down “indie” film version of Flixter (please let me know if one exists).

I guess Flixter, while capable and undoubtedly appealing to many, just didn’t suck in this movie fan – the trailer was enough for me.

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Categories: General, Interesting, Movie News, Technology :: ::

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