It looks like IMDB has finally gotten a bit of a facelift, and there are some things I like about it, but I’ll be honest, it’s not working for me yet. Good marketers and designers try to envision their product’s users as imaginary people so they can figure out the use cases and make sure the value’s there, but I guess I’m the odd one out for being the guy who just wants to see where else I know the actor from in a given movie or TV show.
Anyway, if they’ve got any money left in the development budget, here are my 5 wish list items:
Where have I seen that guy? Like I just said, I’m always going to the site to figure out where else I’ve seen an actor (I’m bad with faces but good with voices.) They’ve added a “best known for” feature on the actor profile page, which helps, but would it kill them to put that in the cast list? Don’t tell me it’s a scaling issue (and let’s put aside the rant about database-driven UI design,) just denormalize the sucker and move on.
Deep data. Why can’t I get a list of every actor who’s ever played an American President, and better still, can we break that down between fictional presidents and actual ones? There’s some capacity for the concept of characters, but usually each president is a different one. There are tons of queries like this that a basic cast and crew list just doesn’t cover. Maybe tagging would help this, I don’t know.
The damned Kevin Bacon game. There’s got to be an exec in the company who keeps asking about this one. Or maybe it’s the “don’t hire” flag in interviews because they’re tired of hearing about it. (And of course I mean the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game, not some weird version where he’s been damned to hell, though that would be something.)
Audio fingerprinting. Here’s my dream app: I’m watching something on TV, don’t know what it is (maybe the TV guide thing is down) or just want to pull the cast info in a hurry. I fire up an app, it grabs a sound bite, and just like the music identification services, the movie gets identified. Granted, probably not something in the current data set, but that would be cool, and if it could use that to tell where you are in a show, the commerce options would be amazing (click here to buy that gun Schwarzenneger’s using!)
An API. Sites that do valuable stuff with their data are more likely to provide APIs. Sites that have DB in their name and are basically front end browsers tend to restrict data a lot closer. C’mon IMDB, start the race! (I think they do have an API, or at least feeds, but it’s not cheap. Amazon, which owns IMDB, probably provides a good chunk of what you’d need through their commerce API anyway.)
When IMDB came out, it was one of the maybe 5 reasons that the internet was actually interesting. It’s probably still in the top 10, and the new facelift is nice and all, but I’d love to see it grow even further.
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