Perspectives

I am not exactly sure when they released this new looking Yahoo India Movies, but finally , they are thinking about movies and what people do with movies.

The older version used to be service with no real value add to anyone. It had a bunch of images, videos and links and stopped at reviews and comments. With the world talking about web3.0 and mobile2.0 , it was time the site had an overhaul with layout, content and everything.

Yahoo India Movies now tries to give movie showtimes close to about twenty three cities. The show times are apparently from bookmyshow ( which is a pretty good service, btw) with ticketing option coming soon. Now, we are talking business.

The “A-Z index” was pretty interesting. It gives a list of all the movies releasing this year and in the past. I discovered a few movies that I ve never heard of before. “Coming soon” should be pretty handy too, considering Imdb does not do a very good job for Indian movies. Not sure if you are the kinds that sits and reads interviews of random celebrities. If you are, there is a section for you as well. I guess, they will also have some downloadable stuff like ringtones and wallpapers and what not. Not for me. Oh, you can watch trailers too.

Dont expect to see a radical layout change. It is a very usual Yahoo look with a banner ad on top and left with links that says “replay ad”! (Give me a break guys. ).

No feeds either. Wish I could subscribe for “coming soon” movies. Or maybe subscribe to a search criteria (say action movies) in a few theatres.

But there is still one reason why I would never go back to this site. No Search. How am I supposed to see “No smoking” trailer now? Keep clicking the links and hope that I will find it ?

I was talking to a friend of mine a little while ago. I was telling her about the movies I had watched over this weekend. I recollect one of them, but the other, I just could not! Just goes to show what I think of the movie I guess.

Immediately, I headed over to my rusting “My Movies” section of IMDb and updated it with these two movies. But, frankly, IMDb is an archaically designed website and I wish folks at Amazon do something about it before some whizkid comes up with something more usable.

So, Conviced that “My Movies” ( Personalization features needs a little ingenuity in their naming. We got “My Yahoo” and “my Web” from Yahoo, “My Maps” from Google and this, “My movies”. ) is not what I am looking for, I hunted around to see if there is any usable Movies API out there. The closest I came to is IMDb interfaces. It is definitely a good start, but you need a ton of storage. Plus, I dont exactly understand how they (or me, if I were to use it) intend to keep it up-to-date. Do I need to keep downloading and compiling their data package ? But, if you are really eager to do something with movies, I think it is fair to begin with this.

I did not find anything else worth mentioning. I think this space is completely empty and the movie guys like Yahoo, aol, go etc should come forward and give us something to mashup with.

So, want an idea with Movies? Ofcourse. So, I need a place where I can quickly go type in a couple of words. It then gives me back a list of matching movies. I want to pick a movie out of it. (This is the movie I just watched). Now, as time progresses, You should be able to guess my favorite actor, actress, director, language, genre etc.

Hopefully, you can hook up to your database and give me suggestions on what I should be watching next! ( The puritans will have a problem with privacy, but not a problem for me). This is adding practical value ( I am looking for a term for this, any suggestions?). If you were to stop with just collecting my data, I aint giving you any!

Give me a badge that I can show off on my blog (yeah! ofcourse, I will say that)
Game to do?
Update: Oh, Forgot to tell you these two things:

Saw movie reviewr. Good start. And, found this on blogthings.

Your Movie Buff Quotient: 42%

You are well on your way to becoming a movie buff. You’ve seen many of the great films, and you have even probably developed an expertise in a few genres.