

I made a website that rates the latest movies by analyzing social media - buzzscale
http://www.buzzscale.com
Let me know what you think.  I'd like to expand it to more data sources and also start analyzing other products such as tv shows, books, video games, phones, cars etc...
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basseq
Interesting idea; I'd be interested to see a full correlation between
Buzzscale scores and other ratings sites (IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes). Based on a
quick analysis of the top movies on the front page (vs. Rotten Tomatoes user
ratings) it seems to be pretty well correlated. It seems to do a bad job
identifying "eh" movies (e.g., Gangster Squad: BS-80 RT-64 and Hansel &
Gretel: BS-76 RT-64). Buzzscale scores also seem to be more uniform in nature:
pretty much everything is 70-85.

Any thoughts on "ratings effects"? E.g., proportionality to either gush about
a movie or pan it, exclusively? Lack of nuanced reviews? (No one goes on
Twitter to say, "It was whatever.")

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joshuahedlund
It does seem like "gushers" and "panners" tend to overcrowd reviews, but I was
curious enough to do a quick Twitter search. About half of these results are
"ok" tweets about movies/TV shows, so maybe there _are_ enough people going to
Twitter to say "whatever": <https://twitter.com/search?q=watched%20was%20ok>

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gsharma
Looks interesting. fflick.com did this sometime back and were acquired by
Google.

A feature suggestion - "Enter your email to get weekly notification for movies
with more than 80 buzzscore" (where 80 is editable.) An extension to this
could be email me movies that are popular for their comedy, acting or the
story.

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adventured
Look good, but it needs to assess sentiment rather than just buzz (and it
needs to grade buzz a lot better).

Gangster Squad for example has a 80 buzz score, but it got between terrible
and mediocre reviews. Django has an 85 buzz score, but got almost universally
great reviews. Django will make roughly 4 to 5 times as much money as Gangster
Squad, and was just about blanket everywhere in the media 24/7, so it's very
unlikely Ganster has anywhere close to as much actual buzz as Django.

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F_J_H
You're right, but your comment made me think of something Andy Warhol once
said:

 _"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in
inches"_

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examancer
I am not sure if this site provides an accurate aggregate view of public
opinion on movies, but if it does then I have no desire to know what the
public likes. I also don't know how this is better than other "what does
everyone think?" ratings available on IMDB or rotten tomatoes.

The real beauty of all the social data now available is that a service like
this could theoretically provide ratings based on the sentiment of people
who's opinions _I_ follow or who are have similar tastes to me. I don't care
how much the average person loves Pitch Perfect, its just not something want
on my list of potential movies. If I were matched through my social iterations
to people who's ratings are relevant that would likely be obvious.

I love seeing new software in this space and I hope you develop it further,
but you're going to need to dive much deeper into the social data available if
you want to really make a disruption.

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ArnoVanLumig
I had an idea about this recently, and would love for someone to further
develop it. I already implemented a proof of concept, but won't have time to
build it to a complete product any time soon.

The (simplified) idea for recommending movies was:

1\. Crawl a torrent site (say, the pirate bay) for as many torrents you can
find. Extract the title, description, magnet link and category for each
torrent. 2\. Use the DHT network to find out which IP addresses are
downloading what torrents 3\. Use these (torrent, ip) tuples to build a
recommendation based on "People who download X also download Y"

This way you can try to find movies that are liked (or actually, downloaded)
by people with similar taste to you. The quality of this recommender is quite
impressive in my opinion.

Email me at arno at vanlumig dot com if you want to see the proof of concept,
I won't post a link here because the performance is quite bad and I'm sure the
server won't be able to handle any significant load.

I will make the data (torrent metadata and data about who downloaded what)
available as soon as I've anonymised the IP addresses, also mail me if you're
interested in that data.

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eranation
Looks great, and useful, wanted to share, but you are missing open graph tags
so facebook share just includes your link, please add meta tags / og tags
(like description, title, image etc) to make easy sharing, this is pretty
important...

see here for more details: <http://ogp.me>

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cpeterso
I haven't seen Billy Crystal's _Parental Guidance_ , but I am surprised that
the film is ranked #8 for "Best Special Effects".

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mr12
You should also display the avg. buzz per week for lets say the first 5 weeks.
You could also display how many weeks movies held a certain buzz level (i.e.
5000 mentions). It seems the way it is currently movies that have been out
longer are going to have a higher buzz than the brand spanking new releases.

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engtech
It seems to me that what you are measuring is how well marketed a movie is,
not how good it is on any scale. Interesting point, compare your results
against box office results.

Also: the hottest and sexiest movies #6: Ice Age??? :)

<http://www.buzzscale.com/?page_id=4134#62458>

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mfonda
This looks like a great way to find movies. I was a bit confused at first
about what the different colors (blue, red, grey) meant. After looking at the
markup I came to the conclusion that blue meant positive and red meant
negative. A bit later I found the explanation hidden behind the "Click to
Learn More". There's no visual indication that this is a link, so I found it
easy to miss. Perhaps it would be good to move the explanations somewhere not
hidden behind a click, or make the place to click more obvious.

~~~
benesch
I'd also recommend choosing different colors. When scanning the list, I want
the hottest movies to jump out, while the less-good movies fade into oblivion.
As it stands now, red is the dominating color, and my eyes are naturally drawn
to the _worst_ movies. If you want to stick with the blue, I'd recommend the
same dark blue for "hot" movies, a lighter blue for mediocre movies, and the
gray for the worst movies.

Nice idea, though; seems to work impressively well.

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pknerd
Care to share technical implementation?

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mathemagical
I feel like I've read the comment I'm about to make somewhere else about
something, so this isn't necessarily my original idea: the buzz is from social
media currently, yes? And it works as a great indicator after the movie comes
out, as people are tweeting/facebooking/etc. about it. But what happens in a
little while when the "buzz" dies down? Or is the idea to just give you a
quick glimpse of currently releasing movies, and not to be a ranking database
of all movies ever made.

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weareconvo
Just FYI, you're violating Twitter's API display guidelines.
<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/embedded-tweets>

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diziet
I'm curious, what Twitter display guidelines is the author breaking?

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weareconvo
When you display a tweet embedded in your page, you have to display it exactly
as they do, which takes up a truly ridiculous amount of space and is
intentionally prohibitive.

And as a sidenote, Twitter would very much prefer if the API would just
disappear, as they get non-linear benefits from users going to twitter.com
instead of accessing its services through a third party. Internally, it is
spoken of as a liability.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
_Internally, it is spoken of as a liability_

I doubt that their API is spoken of as a liability internally because, if it
was spoken of as a liability then Twitter.com itself is a liability. Why?
Twitter.com itself is powered by their API[1]

[1] [http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-
twitt...](http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-
twittercom.html)

~~~
weareconvo
It is spoken of internally as a liability, and the executives want nothing
more than to get rid of it for many reasons, not the least of which being
their current investors care only about user numbers, and don't seem to count
third-party users.

Trust me on this.

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mikeleeorg
Nice! I just had a conversation with a friend about what new game he should
play. Perhaps a nice extension of your platform is to get social media buzz
ratings for games.

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buzzscale
I want to do this if I am successful in marketing this website and people
enjoy using it. Once I've perfected the scoring algorithm, classification,
website design/UI and data sourcing (to incorporate reviews & forums), I plan
on expanding to video games, tv shows and books.

Eventually it would be cool to do stuff like material goods (cellphones,
appliances, etc...) so that consumers have another users to leverage when
trying to find something to buy. Imagine being able to compare cars based on
what people are writing across the web about the cars durability, performance,
comfort when shopping for a car!

But right now I'm working on the website by myself and have a ton of work to
do.

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redspark
This is great. My wife and I are always trying to decide what is worth
watching on Amazon, Netflix, etc. Added to my bookmarks.

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cpeterso
You might like Rotten Tomatoes' RSS feeds for new and "Certified Fresh" DVD
releases:

<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/help_desk/syndication_rss.php>

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carlsednaoui
Nice! I've been wanting to do something similar for a while but have been busy
working on other side projects, glad you got to ship it! Out of curiosity,
what apis are you using?

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buzzscale
I use the rotten tomatoes API to get the movies and automatically create them
as blogs in Wordpress using the wordpress xmlrpc interface. I use the
Clarabridge API for classification and sentiment. Facebook's graph search API
& Twitter API for the data. And duct tape to hold it all together :).

~~~
carlsednaoui
hahaha love it! Just like Macgyver :)

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cocoflunchy
This is great. Already bookmarked.

One little thing though: please add the fullscreen button on these trailers,
it would be much more enjoyable to watch them.

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readme
Excellent idea. I'm already telling people about it.

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gpmcadam
Great job. Any plans to open it up as a web API?

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helloamar
Awesome idea, the best place to know the best movies.

