I Discovered MovieTally today (via eHub). It’s a real basic, neat little app that let’s you keep track of movies you watch and ones you want to see. I was thinking of something like this just last week as movies are a common/easy discussion starter around the water cooler and I always seem to forget what I’ve seen recently. By keeping an inventory, it will be much easier to remind myself.

Now, I’m not a Netflix user, so I imagine there’s something like this built-in to it? I know Blockbuster online had this, but who uses them (other than for the free trial anyway). And, of course there’s also IMDB which has some ability to make lists of movies.

As far as Movietally goes, I dig the basic idea, and see some potential there to be an extremely sticky and fun site. But, there needs to be a lot more data to seed the system. There is a very small amount of movies in there, requiring users to build the database. It would be a whole lot nicer if the data was already in there (movies, directors, actors, acresses, etc) making the search more effective and decreasing the amount of work a user has to do. Perhaps using IMDB data which is available (but maybe not free) would be good start. There are continuing rumors of an IMDB API too, and Movietally would be an excellent use case for it. But, who knows where that’s at? The tagging approach is ok, but tag suggestions (what other tags have people used) on the add page would be helpful. I wouldn’t mind seeing clean urls too, making it easily hackable.

Other reviews:

PostBubble sinks MovieTally, with a focus on the movie review aspect, which I barely took notice of in my first pass. Though the reviews could be valuable long-term, I looked at it as solving my problem with remembering what I’ve watched and hopefully finding some related movies to check out, which while minor, is still a pain-point.

Update

MovieTally got written up by TechCrunch this week. Turns out it was built by a 15-year old. Nice work.

Tags: movietally imdb api