apple juice

Back in the heyday of the internets (the late 90’s) there were all sorts of free services that offered you interesting information for free… with little or no advertising! Moviecritic was one such site. It capitalized on the power of collaborative filltering to recommend movies to you.

Basically you would browse through the movie database, and if a movie was listed that you had seen, you would rate it, 1-5 stars.

After rating a certain number of movies, it would begin to predict movies for you based on your ratings and the ratings of all the other users.

Then the really sweet thing was when you fed another username (the Juice-ette, say) to the site, and it would return movies that both of you will like, based on all these ratings.

Well, somewhere around late 2001 – early 2002 (not sure exactly) the site was shut down. Very sad. A few dark years of movie watching ensued. Somewhere in there we saw ‘Connie and Carla‘. A bad time indeed.

Something sparked my interest in movies this afternoon, so I thought I would see if any sites had cropped up in the wake of Moviecritic.

With that, I give you: movielens

The site is very similar to Moviecritic, and lo and behold, it’s appears to be a research project at the University of Minnesota. So with any luck, after I’ve rated 1000 movies, the site won’t disappear.

So, I strongly urge you, the 3 or 4 readers of my site, to sign up and do some rating. Send me an email to let me know you’ve signed up and we’ll see some movies!