Wow Site of the Week - Flixter

As a Web developer, every now and again, I run into a site that makes me go "Wow! I wish I'd thought of that!" or "Wow! I wish I knew how to program something like that." Today an associate invited me to take a movie quiz at www.Flixter.com. The site lets you share movie recommendations with your friends, or find new friends based on similar movie tastes.

But it's more than that. You get your own profile where you can list your favorite movies, actors, etc. Plus you can create "widgets" to add to your blogs or myspace. A widget can be a link to your reviews and profile or a widget might be a "movie poster" or "actor poster" that you create by selecting your favorite movies and actors (see mine on the left of this blog).

It's intuitive, easy to use and extremely visual: drag and drop. You can easily add graphics of your favorite movies and photos of actors to your profile or posters.

The main thing I didn't like about the site is that it's almost too automated. To tell friends about the site, it asks you to select your email provider - Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or AOL. Then it lists your address book from whichever one you chose and lets you check off the email addresses of the people you'd like to invite. Handy, but what if you don't use these services? Or don't use them enough to have all your contacts in their address books? I usually use MS Outlook and rarely use my Yahoo account. But I was forced to select Yahoo, which only has a few email addresses in it. So I couldn't tell a lot of people that I wanted to about the service (at least not with their tell-a-friend script). I couldn't find any way to add an email address that's not in my Yahoo address book (short of going to Yahoo and adding it and coming back to Flixter... yuck!) Maybe I just missed it, but it wasn't obvious.

Also, the widget that links to your profile and shows your latest movie reviews requires that you leave a comment on a movie and seems to take a little while to kick in. It was about 30 minutes before it stopped showing "Doh! There are currently no reviews to show" and started showing my comments on movies instead.
Overall it's a nifty site and you could spend (or waste) hours (depending upon how you look at it) playing around on it. The programming and graphics are definitely a WOW! Kudos to the creators.