We got a tip today to check out the new beta movie recommendation service Nanocrowd. Introduced into a pretty packed field of services, we went ahead and took a chance. And we are glad we did - It's a very quick way to generate a list of suggested movies that are sure to please. The name, according to the Nanocrowd blog, comes from their unique approach using nanogenres in their recommendation process. More on those below.]]>
Using the service is a breeze, no registration or login is necessary. Simply visit their home page, and type in a movie similar to the one you hope to watch, and finally choose a nanogenre to get your custom-generated list of movie suggestions. The resulting list, in our opinion, has some great suggestions. And, it's actually pretty surprising how choosing different nanogenres changes the resulting list dramatically.
These nanogenres are generated by Nanocrowd's analysis of thousands of movie reviews and commentary from many different data sources. In fact, the three words in each nanogenre are chosen directly from the review data. We liked how easy it was to get in to this application, and its addictive ability to keep us clicking on movie after movie, creating new lists and discovering new movies. In fact, the last movie site that had us so distracted was the Internet Movie Database.
Of course, we couldn't end this post without mentioning some of Nanocrowd's competitors, applications like Clerk Dogs (Ars Technica review), Jinni (another Ars Technica review) and the big players, Amazon and IMDB (yes, they have a recommendation engine too!)
Each of these has some merits. For example, Clerk Dogs will recommend movies based on your movie suggestion in only one step. And they also have some really cool graphs showing match criteria. Jinni requires you to create a login before you can get started, but then you can search for just about anything, such as a genre, plot, mood, or actor name.
How does Nanocrowd stack up against the other guys? Time will tell, and the site is still being actively developed (in fact logging in to save movie lists isn't supported quite yet), but so far, we like that we can dive in and have a list to take with us to Blockbuster (they have a recommendation engine too, by the way) in five minutes or less.
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