TwitCritics

New Bottom Bar

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:49:05 -0500

Slight tweak to our bottom bar. We are in the process of working on a lot of exciting big things but we are still paying attention to the little details that make your experiences on twitcritics as easy and understandable as possible.

Our careful and considered solution to the bottom bar design was to group items according to who we think will be using them.

General Users:

Home, About, Press, Contact

Developers / Power-users:

Blog, Widget

Business (is self explanatory)

- - - - - - - - - - -

Here at TwitCritics we believe, “Little things can make a big difference”.

Join our New Online Forums on TwitCritics.com

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:25:00 -0500

Check it out : http://twitcritics.com/forum/

We are pleased to announce that our very own forums are up and running. Post all your comments, concerns, and suggestions and share your ideas with users of our site. Why not check out our forums today and become one of our very first forum members.

We Have Widgets!

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:08:00 -0500

I’m happy to announce the official release of the TwitCritics widgets that you can embed in your site!

We have a movie list widget (which will stay up to date with the newest movies on TC):

You can get your code for the movielist widget at widget.twitcritics.com (you can adjust some parameters to make it fit where you need it to)

And we have a widget for individual movies which will stay up to date with the score for that movie, like this one for Law Abiding Citizen:

You can get the code for the movie score by clicking on ‘embed this on your site’ on the movie’s page!

*edit* sorry I had to use images. This editor is giving me trouble.

Add TwitCritics.com to your Delicious Bookmarks ~ !

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:05:00 -0500

Why not join the 116 people that have already added TwitCritics to their Delicious Bookmarks? Give it try today.

TwitCritics (New Features) - Your one stop movie review shop

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:25:00 -0500

TwitCritics is now your one stop movie review shop when looking for movie reviews.

Each movie we review will now link to:

The movie’s official movie website
The movie’s Wikipedia entry for the movie
The IMDB entry for the movie
The Rotten Tomatoes entry for the movie
AllPosters.com so you can buy your favorite movie posters (or just click the movie post itself to access this link)

Simply look below the “More” section next to each movie’s poster to find these helpful new movie links. Why not make TwitCritics you first stop for all your movie reviews? If you want a second opinion, we have now made that even easier for you too.

Let us know what you think and what other links you might like to see. :)

Experiment with DVD releases

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:42:00 -0500

As you probably know, we have so far only been adding movies on the day of their theatrical release. This is mostly due to the fact that there are a lot of people talking about movies when they first come out on twitter. In an effort to expand our database, we decided to also add any movies that we aren’t already indexing when they are release on DVD/BluRay. Hopefully there will be an increase in reviews about them when they first come out and we will be able to collect enough tweets.

Today we added:

Aliens In The Attic
Food, Inc.
I Love You Beth Cooper
The Taking Of Pelham 123

GI Joe also came out on dvd today but we already have it in our database. It will likely take some time before they start to show up on the site but it will be interesting to see how it works out.

MJ's This is it on TwitCritics

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:56:00 -0400

Something that we have been trying to figure out for some time is what is the best time to start tracking a new movie? Most new movies seem to start playing at midnight on the day of their release, but do enough people tweet about them overnight to get a lot of reviews? Or will we end up with a lot of tweets like ‘excited to see movie X tomorrow’ etc?

Until now we have been starting to index them later in the day to give people enough time to go see it and tweet their thoughts but we have been interested to see what would happen if we started collecting tweets at midnight.

Well last night’s global premiere of Michael Jackson’s This Is It was the perfect time to test this out, so we did it. You may have noticed that there are increased inaccuracies in the score for this movie. Almost every tweet about the movie that we have seen has actually been positive, and some of them are more about MJ rather than the movie.

So we just wanted to keep you all posted on what is going on. And even though we have seen some decreased accuracy, we believe our little experiment was a success in that it has shown us some issues that we need to address and given us some more information about the nature of tweets as movies are first coming out.

If anybody has any comments or suggestions or any other feedback we’d really love to hear from you. We are trying to make this an application for all of us :)

Go to Michael Jackson’s This Is It reviews on TwitCritics

TwitCritics Layout 2.0 (soon) - Tell us what YOU want to see

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:11:00 -0400

Hey everyone!

Thanks for all the support so far. We are currently working on moving our site to a new higher resolution (to 1024x768 from 800x600).

This higher resolution will mean more possibilities and a better reading resolution for our visitors.

We deeply value our visitors and we want to bring our fans the site that they want to see. If you have any suggestions regarding the layout and/or design of TwitCritcs, things you want to see, things you don’t currently like, then please tweet back at us, comment on our blog, or email twitcritics@twitcritics.com with your suggestions.

Thanks!

The TwitCritics team

Fixed a major issue in the backend

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:36:00 -0400

So it turns out that there is an issue in the Twitter API that was severely limiting the number of new tweets we were collecting. In the order of < 10 per hour. We were alerted to this when we added Paranormal Activity, which has been trending for weeks, and it took over 24 hours to collect enough reviews to get an overall score. We were able to work around the issue tho. So this means there should start to be (many) more reviews for the movies! :)

Support us on killerstartups.com

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:55:04 -0400

It looks like someone posted our site on killerstartups.com (it actually wasn’t us). Show your support by voting for us at http://www.killerstartups.com/User-Gen-Content/twitcritics-com-movie-reviews-powered-by-twitter !

Major Improvements to the Corrections Behaviour

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:46:37 -0400

We have updated the behavior of the corrections links so they should feel much more intuitive (as per feedback we have received). First, we corrected a minor irritating bug where the links would disappear seemingly on their own. Second, now when you click on one of the links you will get a message saying that your correction has been submitted. The overall rating will be updated based on the correction. We should not that the corrections submitted by users are not immediately taken into account. We decided against forcing users to have accounts and need to log in so as a result we have to take measures to make sure that corrections aren’t automatically being submitted. We don’t want to go into the details of how that works, but we want you to know that the corrections you submit are valuable and will help us improve the site. Thanks everyone for the feedback! Let us know what you think of the updated corrections system

http://www.facebook.com/twitcritics

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:23:00 -0400

Now following us on Facebook is easier then ever. http://www.facebook.com/twitcritics

Why not become a fan of our FB page today.

Updated the blog colour scheme

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:37:58 -0400

Just a quick note to say that I have updated the blog colour (yes that’s colour not color) scheme today to better fit with our main site. Hope you all like it.

Worked Out The Kinks In IE7

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:56:36 -0400

There were several minor issues with the rendering of the site in Internet Explorer 7. But we fixed them, so all you IE7 users can rest easy now.

New Feature! Tweet Previews

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:47:10 -0400

We just rolled out a new feature, when you put your mouse over a movie link on the main page it will show you the 4 newest tweets about that movie. Like this:

Announcing Public Beta!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:56:00 -0400

As you can tell from the title of this post, you can tell that we just launched the public beta! You can find it at http://twitcritics.com. We are very excited about the launch and thought that this would be a good time for a proper introduction.

My name is Chris Nicholls (@chris_nicholls), I am the Lead Developer of twitcritics.com. This is a project that we started several months ago and is finally ready to actually be used by someone! Keep in mind that the site is very much in beta, and not everything will work perfectly. Our plan is to continually work to improve the site, and grow it based on the feedback from our users.

Just what is twitcritics.com you ask? What our application does is find tweets about new movies from twitter and automatically determines if they are a positive or negative review. The main page shows you a list of the movies that we are tracking so far, as well as their ‘rating’. The rating is the percentage of tweets that are positive. By clicking on a movie, you can see all of the tweets about the movie that are positive or negative. It is that simple!

Looking through the tweets about a movie, you may encounter some errors. If you do, you can help us improve the Artificial Intelligence engine by moving our mouse over the ‘Mistake?’ text and selecting the appropriate classification.

If nothing else, our system works very well at removing spam and tweets that are not actually a review. We have found that over 90% of tweets that contain the name of a movie are not actually a review of that movie. So at the very least you can browse through the tweets about a movie yourself to get an idea of what the overall opinion on twitter is.

Again, the system isn’t perfect just yet, but it has reached a level where it is usable. Which is why we have released the beta. Despite the margin of error in determining the opinions in tweets, we feel that the rating given for each movie is still quite representative of the actual overall movie.

So enjoy the site! and if you see something that you like or don’t like then we would love to hear your feedback!

Added Search Functionality

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:41:00 -0400

Well the search function is now up an running. Even though we are presently only tracking about 50 movies, we felt it was crucial to have this feature. The reality is that people who come to the site are most likely just going to search for the movie that they want rather than browsing for it. So we made that as easy as possible. We’re adding all new movies as they are released, which is roughly 1-5 new movies per week. As time goes on the search function will be absolutely necessary.

This is one of the last pieces of the puzzle in terms of functionality. We’re getting closer to a public beta every day. Stay tuned!

Facebook Fan Page

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:56:42 -0400

Hey check out our new facebook page and become a fan - http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/TwitCritics/156525276295