moviestring.com the the blog

i know it’s been awhile since we last sat down and chatted, but we’ve been super busy the past few weeks putting the final touches on some great new stuff. so we thought we’d update you on a couple of the new features:

1. new design
   hopefully you’ve noticed we’ve got a spanking new design. in addition to just looking much nicer, it also streamlines navigation and makes better use of screen real estate. the new design will make it much easier for use to add new features and will hopefully make the site a little easier to use. we’re still tweeking the design, so if you have any suggestions feel free to email them to us.
2. twitter reviews
   we’re huge fans of Twitter here at moviestring and we figured why not include some of twitters great content into the site. so we decided to use the awesome twitter search api to aggregate tweets containing movie reviews. we’re still refining the filter algorithm, so some non-reviews might slip through. when you see on, be sure to mark it as “not a review”. try it out
3. youtube reviews
   since we sometimes get lazy and don’t like reading, we figure why not also add some video to moviestring. we’re really stoked to add Youtube video reviews to movie pages. just click the “reviews on Youtube” tab on any movie page (like this one) and we’ll aggregate video reviews of the movie. try it out
4. facebook app
   back by popular demand, we’ve fixed the facebook app and added a few new features (with plenty more to come). also new: now when you post a review, we’ll add it to your news feed. add the app now

that’s it for now. please feel free to email us with any suggestion you might have. you can email info@moviestring.com or me directly travis@moviestring.com

ever wanted to build a kick-ass movie app, but couldn’t find any place to get movie information? want to integrate moviestring.com reviews into your site? well now you can do both. we’re proud to announce developer.moviestring.com

our developer section provides a several apis (with many more to come) to access not only moviestring.com reviews, but also our entire database of over 20,000 movies and 150,00 people. using the api is as simple as registering your api. once your app is registered, start making some calls and build cool stuff.

go to developer.moviestring.com

part one of “new feature friday” saw three big updates. two that you can see and one behind the scene.

1. homepage review tabs
   we’ve added three new tabs to the homepage that allow you to sort the reviews different ways
   • “latest” - the original sort shows you the latest reviews submitted
   • “popular” - will show you reviews with the most “awesome” votes
   • “in theaters” - will show you reviews for movies that are currently in theaters
   • “upcoming” - will show you reviews for movies that will be in theaters this week
2. in-page search
   we’ll admit the whole “go to a new page to search” thing was kind of lame, i mean it is 2008… the age of web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now, i can never keep track). so we changed all of that. now when you click the “find movies” button at the top of the page, a window will side open with a text field. start typing in the text field (labeled “search for movies”) and you’ll be shown the 10 best results we can find.

   and if you really liked the old search page, you can find it at moviestring.com/find

3. utf-8 support we want to start out by apologizing for the lack of utf-8 support in the RC1 release. it was something we kept putting off and then totally forgot. but we’ve got it now, with our pages and rss feeds now outputting proper utf-8 encoding. if you still find problems please let us know!

stay tuned… cause there may be a part two to “new feature friday“