Criticker is a mashup from the people who brought us the Random Good Stuff blog, and while not the most innovative concept ever to exist it is a fun site to play around with.

Criticker

The concept? Criticker pulls movie data, critic reviews and summaries — mashes them together and then lets you rate movies that you’ve seen. My favorite part of this entire system is that it allows you to scan movies by genre and the front page is about as clean as it gets. Unfortunately, this does not spill over into the rest of the application. When you click on a movie, you are treated to a good set of statistics (the kind of stuff you might find in IMDB), but there is so much cruft in the form of affiliates and advertising surrounding it, occasionally it is difficult to tell the difference between ads and features.

Once you get past that and actually vote on a movie, the system responds well. Like most networks that rely on people to rate content, it will become even more useful as it scales up. However, even without scale the meta-data that they pull in makes the site a nice place to do a quick look up of a movie before heading over to Netflix to pick it up.

Web 2.0 Roundup

My take? It’s an interesting mashup and a useful service for anyone who wants to crowdsource their next movie rental. There are a lot of other programs operating in this space so I would suggest that they look into a way to differentiate themselves from big players like Rotten Tomatoes and in a smaller sense IMDB itself. I wish them the best of luck.

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