sekizaru

Wow! Nice work. I had the exact same idea awhile back and even started on a prototype version of it. Really happy (and a bit jealous) to see it done so well.

Some of the things that I thought would be good: Auto-complete (with a drop-down box) for the search box is a really nice way to search a restricted domain like movie names. This reference was useful for me: http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/ncz/colum... Although the search result page is good so need to find a balance between directing to the actual movie page and the search page.

Combined lists with other users was the main focus I had when I was playing with this. Good to make it more obvious that inviting your friends allows you to do this. The example in your blog explains this well.

More lists of movies in the Discover Movies page. The people/genre lists are great but there are a lot more possibilities. Examples: All Academy award winners (by category), Box Office Top 10, Top Grossing Movies of all time, Top movies from other Ratings sites. I think people like to be able to tick off a complete list of something.

Adding to the list idea, have custom lists created by users. This would be a good viral idea for sharing via Facebook ex. Joe's Top 10 Worst Movies of All Time! How many have you seen?

Make these list pages as linkable as possible (not just on Facebook) as it will help with ranking on the search engines.

The viral strategy is a very good approach, but good to have multiple approaches. More link-worthy pages = more links = better search engine rankings. One more example, make it very, very easy for people to add a link to their profile on their blogs etc. There was also a post here just the other day about startup sites to submit to. Try that as well.

Some options for sorting or re-arranging the movies would be nice.

bl4k mentioned affiliate links as a good revenue source. One other possibility would be to pay for privacy so that you can keep your profile private.

I found that there are lots of movies that I have seen that I want to see again. I know that adding this concept complicates the UI but if you find a nice way to do it it would be useful.

Include the year after the movie title on the hover overlay.

I was reluctant to log in using Facebook because I didn't want to post all the movies to my profile. Might be good to include some more clarification about what you do with a users profile (and the email address you need to provide). I'm sure this would increase the sign up rate.

Are there any issues with using TMDB for some of the data? It might not be an issue now but could become an issue if you get more popular.

Not sure if some of the pages already include this but a recommended list based on selecting popular movies from other users who have seen similar movies to you.

Add a link to a movie trailer site

I really like the implementation of "I dont want to see this movie". Good how you just add it on the Discover page and not the individual movie page.

Add affiliate links to Netflix sooner rather than later. It's useful for users and gives you a good idea how much revenue you can earn with little effort.

Keep up the great work! Would be great to see a first x months stats post on Hacker News sometime soon.

I spoke to someone at Wolfram about using the API about 6 months ago and they said they would try and get me access to their "Pioneer Grant" which is the free version of the API. No word since then. The pricing for the regular API is prohibitively expensive. How did you intend to use it?

Congratulations on making the move to full-time!

At the beginning of last year I made a similar move from being a Japanese salaryman to my own business. I was writing code in a notebook on my 1.5 hour train commute and on my lunch break and then typing it up on weekends. After I went full-time on my own business I found that the scope of what I wanted to do expanded and my productivity dropped. Also, the time-management skills that worked well on a part-time basis didn't work as well when I went full-time. I also found that it was easy to get sidetracked by side-projects and that personal life (time with friends, holidays) became a larger part of my life. I also found that a lot of things that I wasn't so great at (web design, graphics) etc. took up a large amount of my time.

So I would be interested to hear your thoughts on time-management, prioritization and working from home once you go full-time if you decide to do this as a series.

Thanks for this. Lamson looks very powerful but it's probably overkill for what I'm looking for.

Thanks. This does look amazing. I'll try it out and post my results back here. Interested to hear what kind of things you you or others use it for. It really gets you thinking about new possibilities.

This reminds me of a problem I've been wanting to solve for a long time.

A lot of web apps use email to deliver notifications and other data like reports. I want to take these emails and process them whenever a new email arrives. A few qualifications: The email server and the processing server are separate. Need to access any attached files as well as the message body and other headers. *Ideally, I don't want to deal with any email related libraries at all i.e. want to use something like a Rest API or even FTP (like in the libgmail library linked to in this post). This would make it usable from any language without needing a special email library.

Example Use Case: Your web analytics software sends you a daily report with an attached CSV file. You want to grab the data from the CSV and put it in a database so you can create a nice dashboard for your site.

Would love to hear from anyone that has had experience with a system like this and could point me in the right direction.

I second this one but would recommend learning Javascript by using Greasemonkey and the introductory guide "Dive Into Greasemonkey" which was discussed here recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897706.

Greasemonkey lets you make changes to websites by writing small programs and it is fairly easy to find problems around the web to fix.

Example problem to solve: Hide posts on Hacker News from blogs that you already read elsewhere or that you don't like.

The Firefox add-ons blog just posted some results from their "Contributions Pilot" where they were testing accepting donations for add-ons. http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/10/19/contributions-a-lo... Interestingly, the $5-$10 range seems to be the sweet spot there as well. In this case though the add-on author suggests an amount to donate which might skew the results compared to Goo's results.

Point taken. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy is the PR industry. I know the PR industry gets almost as much criticism as SEO. But the argument that we shouldn't use specialists in whatever field because we could do it ourselves is very damaging. Here's another example. If I run a coffee shop and 50% of my customers are walk-ins from the street, it makes sense for me to hire a sign-writer to attract more people. Even though my coffee might be the same as always I get more customers because people can find my shop. I could paint the sign myself but hiring an expert to do it will likely pay for itself. If I run a website and 50% of my customers come from search engines then it makes sense to invest an appropriate amount in making sure those customers can find me. If I have a small site, that investment might be of my time or I could outsource it. So the important thing is that we need to invest in what brings new customers. If you think that an SEO professional doesn't deliver enough value that's a perfectly valid decision but I think it's a big mistake to extend this to not investing in SEO itself.

The argument that web designers, web developers etc. should understand everything related to their work is fine at a small scale eg. creating a personal blog/small website. But it's a stretch to say that nobody should focus on just one area.

To be an expert at something normally requires that you specialize in that area. For a start-up you need to be a jack-of-all-trades but as a company grows it makes sense to have staff that specialize in different areas.

My background is in pay-per-click marketing and a lot of companies do very well managing their own Adwords campaigns. But for large companies or small companies that don't want to deal with learning a new skill, the cost of hiring/outsourcing to someone who specializes in that is justified by the time saved and the improved ROI. This applies to SEO as well but also to any area where the work involved has a significant impact on the business.

I was looking forward to using the API in my Firefox add-on that shows the Wolfram Alpha results next to the Google results. Quick calculation of the cost: 18,000 users/day * say 3 searches/day = ~$2,300/day. I think I'll stick with loading it in an iframe. I would have thought that this kind of thing fit perfectly with the example use case "augmenting web and meta-web search with computed knowledge" but I guess they have a different target market.