Webware

Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.

Flixster 1.0 sure didn't look this good on our BlackBerry Bold--but the next version will.

(Credit: Flixster)

We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.

The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry has all the essentials: a tab for box office hits, an area to enter your Zip code to find movies near you, a list of upcoming titles, and movies that have come out on DVD. You can even purchase movies via movietickets.com. Yet this movie "app" is not so much a native application as it is a shortcut to a BlackBerry-optimized version of Flixster's mobile Web site.

While a nicely formatted mobile site routinely delivers a better experience than navigating the site through a browser, winding up with a not-app after downloading an application feels like a cheap trick. To top it off, Flixster Mobile looks like a mobile site on BlackBerry and reloads every screen as you navigate. In contrast, the iPhone version, pulls show times and theater information into a stylized interface that in no way resembles the Flixster.com site, apart from the information it downloads.

Users aren't fooled by the bait-and-switch, either. Flixster's movie app on BlackBerry rates 2.5 stars out of 129 votes at the time of writing. The program's average iPhone rating scores higher, with a 3.5-star average for the current version out of about 16,000 user reviews.

Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that.

(Credit: CNET)

ScreenTunes is a free search tool that helps users find where a song has been played in any piece of professionally-produced video content. You just type in the name of the song and it tells you all the films and TV shows in which it's appeared. You can then listen to the track right from the results (using Grooveshark), or purchase the track on iTunes or Amazon's online stores.

Along with acting as a search tool for individual songs, ScreenTunes can be used to look up a track by its lyrics. This also works on entire movie titles, so you can type the name to get a quick track list.

I found the service to be a bit hit or miss, but when it works it's quite neat. Many test searches I did came up with zero results, often times because I had either left a word off the title of the song, or it simply wasn't in the database. Clearly you get better results if it's a mainstream track, but it's surprising to see how many places any one song can end up.

Connecting with other movie fans and discussing films you select from Netflix can be fun. Although sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have become important parts of the online experience for movie buffs, they aren't exactly the forums for engaging movie chat and social networking that the sites in this roundup are. Below are some of the best I've found.

Movie social networks

Filmcrave Filmcrave lets you create lists of all the movies you love, rate films, and discuss those ratings with friends in the site's forums. You can also find other members who might have similar movie tastes by comparing their reviews to yours. Filmcrave is designed well but doesn't stand out from the competition.

Create your own movie lists on Filmcrave to share with others.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Flixster Once you sign up for Flixster, you'll immediately be asked to find friends who are already on the service. It takes only a few seconds, so it's worth trying.

When complete, you can take a test that will help determine how compatible your movie tastes are with your friends'. You can check out movies, tell others what your favorite films are, use widgets that let you add voice comments to Flixster, and more.

The site even has a chat function, so you can instant-message with others while reading up on films. And unlike the other services in this roundup, Flixster is available for mobile phones, including the iPhone and BlackBerry. It also has applications on MySpace and Facebook. It's everywhere for good reason--it's the best movie social network on the Web.

Flixster lets you see how compatible you are with your friends.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Reddit has a new dedicated video site called Reddit.tv for clips that have become popular on its main page, as well as on its "sub-Reddit" categories. It consists of a simple video player that streams in clips, along with a playlist that lets you jump around. Nearly all of the ones I saw were from YouTube, but there were a few from Vimeo as well. There's also the option to send the video you're watching as a Twitter message, which links back to the Reddit.tv player. Users of Ffwd's Twitmatic will feel right at home.

The site is a little more than just a video playlist though. It's also linking to the source discussion on Reddit, as well as highlighting the top-rated user comment. It's a tad sparse considering the richness of a good Reddit comment thread (which can be several hundred comments long), but for casual users who don't know much about Reddit, it's a nice way to get them in the door.

Competitor Digg has had its own video subsection since late 2006, which simply takes all the popular videos from its various categories and puts them on one page; however it doesn't have a unified player. The closest it comes is by letting users play the videos right on the site as an overlay if the video creators have allowed for embedding off-site.

Reddit.tv showcases all the videos made popular on Reddit along with its sub-sections and highlights user discussions that surround them.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

(Credit: CNET)

Apple Insider has unearthed proof that YouTube uploading will be built into the upcoming version of QuickTime that ships with OS X 10.6.

According to beta testers, several video-sharing options will be baked into the latest release of Apple's QuickTime media playback and editing software, including the capability to directly upload to YouTube. With the new QuickTime, you will be able to convert and upload any supported video file type to the online video service and all you will need is to be a registered YouTube user. You also will be able to seamlessly upload supported video to the MobileMe Gallery.

In addition to these new sharing options, iTunes also will offer ways to convert and export your video files to work on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. All of these options will be available to you from the same convenient location and will automatically be imported to iTunes before being synced to your supported devices.

With this latest discovery, Apple will effectively offer built-in support for YouTube across all of its main products. Both the iPhone and Apple TV already offer YouTube support, along with some of Apple's other software including recent releases of iMovie. With the addition of direct uploads through QuickTime, Apple is providing support for desktop and laptop Macs.

The twit that got Amanda a free movie ticket.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Ever since the end of the original Napster, it's been a known fact that music labels and movie studios watch and monitor what Internet users download. What's less known is how closely they are doing that.

According to TorrentFreak, Twitter user Amanda Music got a nice surprise Monday when Miramax contacted her to offer two free tickets to the film "Adventureland."

It all started Sunday with her twit that read, "Ugh WHY IS ADVENTURELAND NOT ON TORRENTS YET?." Apparently, she was looking to download a pirated copy (recorded by a camcorder inside a movie theater) of the newly released movie, but she failed to find a torrent for it.

(Credit: TorrentFreak.com)

Soon after writing the twit, Amanda Music got a message saying, "Cmon Amanda, don't do it. #adventureland #fbi," to which she replied jokingly, "Okay I won't, JUST FOR YOU."

Then, to her surprise, Amanda Music got a message from MiramaxFilms that said, "Thanks Amanda. In return, I have a free Fandango card for 2 tix if you're interested in 'Adventureland.' Just DM us for the code."

In the end, Amanda Music did get one ticket (instead of two) and she said she would go see the movie today. She told TorrentFreak that she "couldn't find a working 'Adventureland' torrent anyway."

While this seems like a good business practice and nobody was harmed, it is kinda scary to know how closely we're being watched. If a company can reach us to give a reward, it may very well be able to do the same when it wants something else.

Maybe it's not a good idea to tell the whole world everything you are up to.

I won't believe it for sure until we see grainy paparazzi shots of actor Michael Cera walking around on a movie set in a North Face fleece and Adidas flip-flops, but it looks like things are moving forward on the film based on the early days of Facebook.

And, Business Insider hears, Facebook may be warning former employees not to talk to people involved with the making of the movie.

This is consistent with something I heard last fall from an early Facebook employee who is no longer with the company. This former Facebooker said the company had told the movie's team that it was unwilling to cooperate in the event that the film was based on a salacious new tell-all book about Facebook--and that indeed appears to be the case.

The movie, as you may recall, is spearheaded by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin and is reportedly based on a book by Bringing Down the House author Ben Mezrich, known for scandalous tales of ambition and temptation set at elite universities. That's a fine match for Facebook, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and some of his friends while they were all undergraduates at Harvard.

But when screenshots of Mezrich's book proposal were leaked to the Web last year, it became evident that Zuckerberg wasn't going to be painted in the best light, and also that there may be a gray area in the fact-checking department. The proposal mentions, for example, a scene in which Zuckerberg dines on exotic food on the yacht belonging to the CEO of Sun Microsystems; Scott McNealy, who would have been CEO of Sun at the time, openly professes to never having owned a boat.

Sounding like a darker and more cutthroat Revenge of the Nerds, the proposal talks about how Zuckerberg created Facebook so he could hook up with more girls--something that Facebook insiders scoff at because Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since before he built Facebook--and climbed to the top of Harvard's social ladder.

Mezrich's book is reportedly hitting stores this fall. There isn't yet a timeline on Sorkin's movie adaptation that we know of.

There are dozens of movie recommendation engines on the Web. Some require little or no input before they give you titles, while others want to find out exactly what your interests are. I've been using 10 movie recommendation engines on both sides of the equation. They're all different, but some are definitely better than others.

The Top 10

Netflix makes recommendations pretty, but...

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

10. Netflix Netflix asks you to rate movies to determine which films you'll want to see next. And although it does make it easy to rate movies and it does return huge lists, there's too much duplication in the results and the ideas it gives you aren't all that strong. It's easy to use, but it's not the best way to get movie recommendations.

9. Rotten Tomatoes Instead of telling Rotten Tomatoes which films you like, you can tell it what kind of films you enjoy, which actors you want to see, and other criteria to help it find the best movie for you. There's a lot of variability in the quality of Rotten Tomatoes recommendations but it's also a nice way to find the right film for any mood.

8. Movielens Movielens is ugly. But what it lacks in beauty, it makes up for with a great recommendation engine that evaluates your tastes based on ratings to films you've seen before. Once you rate 15 movies, it returns recommendations that, based on my testing, were quite accurate and certainly more relevant than results from Netflix.

7. Flixster Flixster is the pretty version of Movielens. The site allows you to rate films and it returns recommendations that are about as good as Movielens. Beyond beauty, Flixster beats out Movielens because it offers extras like film quizzes, the capability to monitor friends' ratings, and more. It's good for people who want more than just movie ideas.

6. IMDb Instead of asking you to input ratings or to tell it what movies you like, IMDb automatically recommends similar films to the movie you search for. At the bottom of the page, a "Recommendations" section explains that if you liked a respective film, you'll like the handful of other films being displayed, based on information gathered from an IMDb database, which examines films to find similarities and differences. It's a great way for people who don't have time to rate movies to find some films worth watching. Even better, the recommendations are solid.

Yep, Iron Man was a good movie.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

5. Criticker Criticker is another one of those sites that places no stock in design, but it does a fine job of finding movies worth watching. Instead of just allowing you to rank films, the site compares your ratings to those of other users and employs something called the "Taste Compatibility Index" to see how closely your tastes match these other users. Once the service finds matches, you can view other users' profiles and see which movies they like. When I tried it, the other users' preferences were in line with my own on almost every film. Combining community and functionality, Criticker is a unique, yet worthwhile service to check out.

4. Clerkdogs Input the name of a film you like and Clerkdogs will return similar films. It's that simple. And it works. For both major movies and small films, it always found relevant recommendations when I gave it a starting point of a film I liked.

3. Nanocrowd At first glance, Nanocrowd looks like every other film search engine: you input the name of a film you like and it returns results. But the site goes well beyond a simple results page. Nanocrowd allows you to drill down into a more refined search with the help of a "three-word nanogenre." On the results page, you click which three-word category you prefer, based on keywords related to the movie you input into the search field, and Nanocrowd immediately refines your search to get the best film for you. Even better, the films it displays aren't always blockbusters.

2. Taste Kid If you want more than good movie recommendations, Taste Kid is the site for you. It's simple enough--you input a film you like and it returns results that offer similar action to your favorites. But it goes beyond just movies. If you really like "The Godfather," Taste Kid fills you in on what kind of bands you'll like to listen to, books you'll want to read, and "other stuff" that's related to that film. Taste Kid is a full entertainment recommendation engine.

Semantic search on Jinni is incredible.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

1. Jinni Jinni is the best movie recommendation engine on the Web. Period. Whether you want to search for films in the search field or you want to find films based on your mood, time available, setting, or reviews, the site has it all. I searched for movies based on my mood and followed that with a search based on my plot preference. Each time, films that I've watched and loved in the past, or that I haven't watched but definitely want to see popped up.

But perhaps the most compelling feature that Jinni offers is its semantic search. You can input terms like, "movies that have gangsters" or "films that show Chris Farley yelling" and the site will return films that match your query. It's mind-blowing.

Go use Jinni. You won't regret it.

Jinni, a semantic search engine for movies, now works with Netflix. If you're a Netflix subscriber, you can link up your account and get custom-tailored search results and recommendations based on what you've watched and rated on the DVD rental service.

I've been giving it a spin over the past day and it's downright cool. If you've used Netflix's own search tool (which I find highly underpowered), you'll appreciate that Jinni gives you many more ways to sort out and hone the results.

Jinni's movie search engine works great with Netflix, and you can even limit its results just to movies you can rent or stream from the service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Jinni organizes search results in a cloud with varying sizes of thumbnails, with the larger ones being the most relevant to your search. You can also adjust it to show how long each movie is, what it's rated, and what year it came out. Hovering over any of these results expands it, giving you a brief description of the film, and if you've linked up your Netflix account, the option to add it to your queue. There's also the option to search only from movies you can stream from Netflix's Watch Instantly service--something you can't even do from Netflix.com.

What I really like about this integration is that Netflix users who are new to Jinni can start using it to discover new movies without having to go through the rating and bookmarking process all over again. If you've rated just a few movies on Netflix, it will already have recommendations for you based on a combination of those ratings and your rental history. Netflix does the same thing, but this way you can continue to rate movies in Netflix and get a whole new layer of recommendations along with a better search tool.

Jinni is in private beta, although I got access just a few minutes after signing up.