The Movie Review Query Engine, at www.mrqe.com, has launched a new tool that aggregates movie reviews posted to Twitter. (Both movies on DVD/Blu-ray and movies in theaters are included.) Flicktweets, which is in beta, is available at www.flicktweets.com. It’s a good idea, but it does have some beta bits.
The front page does give you a search engine box but also a list of various movies and a timeline of reviews. When I looked at the page it started with “Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land (2008)” and ended with “Treeless Mountain (2008)”. Unfortunately the first movie didn’t actually have any reviews, just an error message that read “flicktweets is refreshing…please check back in one minute.”
When the movie does have tweets associated with them, they’re simple; the latest three tweets on that movie including the Twitter user’s avatar. A date stamp of the tweet is included, along with links to see the original tweet and a link to reply. If there are more than three tweets available, a JavaScript link will unroll them onto the page for you. If you want to look at more than ten tweets per movie, you’re directed to Twitter.com.
Now, for the beta bits — Flicktweets has made a good effort to filter out non-movie review tweets from its Web site, but there’s still some failure. Mostly this is the fault of the movie names: “Not Forgotten,” for example, or “Julia”. There will be a little noise in the listings.
I tried using the search engine to find “Finding Nemo,” which came out in 2003, and to my surprise I found several reviews of it even though it’s a pretty old movie. Granted not all the tweets were reviews (“I have never seen Finding Nemo”) and some of them are not particularly detailed (You watched Finding Nemo in biology? REALLY? !) but I can see where this would be an easy way to get a quick idea of the general option of a movie.
It would be great if you could filter the shown review-tweets to see just those that have links (with the assumption that they’d lead to reviews or more information) or even by those in a certain geographical area, but that might be a bit much to ask for.
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