The other day, one of my Friendfeed friends posted a link to a new site called iCheckMovies. I popped on over and signed up for an account to see what it’s all about. I love the idea of being able to keep track of movies I’ve watched, share them with others and keep a list of the ones I want to see. For a while, I tried to use Flixter on Facebook to do the same thing (and I think it still has potential, but there’s so much else going on both on Facebook and in the Flixter app, that it’s hard to concentrate).
Basically, the service allows you to search their database of movies and indicate whether or not you’ve seen the film. You can then indicate if a movie is one of your favorites or if you disliked the movie. If you haven’t seen a movie, you can add it to a “watch list” indicating that you want to see it in the future. Apparently, once you’ve entered enough data, iCheckMovies will even begin recommending movies that you should see. You can even go directly to the movie’s page on Amazon so you can buy it right away.
I think iCheckMovies is a good concept and it’s off to a good start, but it has a long way to go. Following are some of the annoyances I have with the service and some suggestions on how I would like to see it improve.
- The hover-over dropdown menus you use to “favorite,” “dislike,” etc. movies is a real pain. I constantly end up accidentally brushing my cursor over the menus and they never seem to go away until I hover over one of the menu items and then mouse out (and, 9 times out of 10, I end up accidentally opening one of the other dropdowns when I mouse out).
- They need to use concurrent AJAX calls when checking the checkmarks next to the movies. People with really fast Internet connections probably don’t notice the issue, but the service would be so much nicer if I could just start checking off movies down the list without having to wait for each one to finish loading before moving onto the next. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, head on over to Facebook and start “ignoring” a bunch of the Farmville or Mafia Wars requests that have been sent to you. You don’t have to wait for one request to finish loading before you start ignoring the next.
- I would really like to have the ability to search according to a specific actor or director. Currently, you can only search according to the title of the movie (which, in some cases, doesn’t even seem accurate).
- I’d like to see them use either modal windows or accordion-style effects to display the details of a film, rather than having the film details open on an entirely new page.
- It seems that they are working on this, but it would be nice to be able to add movies to their database.
- The categorization could be a bit better. I honestly have no idea why certain movies are categorized the way they are. It might be nice if there was some sort of feedback feature allowing us to indicate when we think a movie doesn’t belong in a certain category.
Have you used iCheckMovies, yet? If so, what are your thoughts on how the service could improve? What are they doing right? I’d love to hear your opinions.
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