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TwitCritics: Rotten Tomatoes For The Twitterverse?

Posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 by Peter Sciretta

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A new website has launched called TwitCritics, which essentially trying to be the Rotten Tomatoes of Twitter. But instead of compiling reviews from movie critics, TwitCritics brings you real-time movie reviews and ratings directly from the Twiterverse. Basically, the site compiles a listing of tweets by movie title, and attempts to determine whether a tweet is positive or negative based on keywords used in the tweet. The idea is great, but right now the beta product is not ready for primetime.

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For example, the below tweets are not completely accurate.

But to be fair, the site allows users to correct the positive/negative rating, and with a full time human moderator, these mistakes could be easily avoided. I really believe that Twitter is a powerful tool, which has yet to be completely harnessed. Websites like this will take this real-time data and provide analysis, which will result in some awesome real-time data we’ve never seen before.

In terms of cinema, we’ve seen countless news stories crediting Twitter for good or bad buzz that has resulted in good or bad box office. We could debate all day if Twitter has any power at the box office or not, but the bottom line is that Twitter features a good sample of real time moviegoers, and the buzz they spread on Twitter is an accurate representation of the word of mouth they spread in the real world.

The only difference is that when someone sees a bad movie, they will tell only a few people in their life to avoid or see it. But now with real time status updates like Twitter and Facebook, people are alerting a large portion of their friends, sometimes hundreds or thousands of people. Someone who was thinking of seeing a movie two hours from now might reconsider if a few of their twitter friends tweet out bad reviews, and might consider another film based on friend recommendations. So I think there is clearly a value in tools like this website which will be able to study and contextualize this real-time buzz. And it can only get more complex and accurate from here.

via: mashable

Comments

Blake Brown

cool idea. seems like it'd be kind of hard to regulate though, as you identified.

riggs

where the wild things are scored lower than law abiding citizen? seems more like the metareview of twitterverse.

Josh

I saw both, and I felt that Law Abiding Citizen was a much better film that Wild Things. Granted, the ending would have been better if it had gone the way the average person wanted it to at that point, but it was still better. I was thoroughly disappointed with Wild Things.

Brad Arnold

Well, there's just no accounting for taste.

Manu

I have to admit, I couldn't care less. Tweets _from my friends_ could actually influence what movie I'm going to see, yes. But this tool can't provide me with any data that IMDB or similar sites do not already show me - which I also don't really care too much about, because an opinion from someone I don't know has very little value to me.

gearhead364

Rather than trying to understand what the tweet is saying, I suggest that they develop a series of hashtags, so when someone tweets their view, all they have to do is add #tcgood or #tcbad. Makes it much easier to get good results and eliminates the 'crowd sourced' moderation that they are using.

David Delgado

I agree with this. For Fantastic Fest, they let you rate movies on B-Side. Here is how it went:

"@festg title of film #rate4 #cv09

The first hash tag is the star rating (you may use #rate1, #rate2, all the way up to #rate5) and the second hash tag indicates which festival you’re attending (e.g. #cv09 = CineVegas 2009). The unique twitter code for each festival will be announced via the @festg Twitter account."

Doesn't have to be quite that complicated, but it would give much more accurate results.

mchops

yeah it may provide data but I don't listen to people I don't know either. how can i tell if someone who just reviewed a movie is a fan of scifi or fantasy or drama or what? they don't know my likes and dislikes.

Name

critics may be dumb, but people are stupid. that's why the stars n'bars crowd are putting "couples retreat" up there with "where the wild things are".

mchops

but on the other hand it is a way to provide data quickly and keep me from possibly seeing a bad movie.

twitcritics

Thanks for the review!

Our Sentiment Analysis engine is a work in progress. It became accurate enough that we were reasonably comfortable with it and decided to put up a beta and work at iteratively improving it on a regular basis. We have had a lot of corrections submitted over the last few days, and they should go a long way towards making our engine better.

starscream9289

Toy Story 3D: 64%

Law Abiding Citizen: 83%

Thank you for confirming to me that society's taste in movies is going downhill.

quintushalls

"EliteCreeGodess wow just woke up watched 3 good movies last night Law Abiding Citizen, Xmen Orgins, and Transformers 2!! FUN FUN FU"

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

starscream9289

I guess people can't enjoy movies that aren't packed with baysplosions and CGI nowadays.

Octoberist

to be honest, i think people like that have been around since the dawn of time; now we just have the technology to share the info, no matter how stupid they are.

robo_c

heres the problem...people in general have a terrible taste in movies...law abiding citizen is the highest rated movie on that list

waqman

Looks like crap to me. "A Serious Man" and "Toy Story 1 and 2" scoring lower than Law Abiding Citizen...right

goldfarb

personally I prefer the demograhic spread of Rotten Tomatoes over Twitter, which to me, seems to be mostly morons under 25...present company excepted.

goobity

They need to call it something else.

Don't they understand that the word "twit" means "imbecile" ?
Random morons offering critical film analysis.
Oh, the irony.

freemachine

First of all, it's "tweet" not "twit". Second, if you bothered to look up Twitter's history you'd know that it is aptly named. Jack Dorsey looked up the word in a dictionary: "a short burst of inconsequential information".

goobity

The proposed site is called "TwitCritics". If you bothered to read the article...

dallegre

Based on that screencap, it seems like it's not great at determining what's a real review, or what's truly positive or negative.

Captain_Howdy

Agreed -- seems like it might need an 'undecided' option. Otherwise it's not such a bad idea.

freemachine

I think this would make an interesting smartphone app. Of course, Twitterverse will never come close to the usefulness of "Runpee.com", which tells you the best time to hit the bathroom during a film and exactly what you'll be missing.

DemasiadoCine

This things are a little random you know. Is like IMDB, and stuff... ratings are over-valorated to my point of view. Anyway, I think this resource is a good one, because brings to a lot of people, names of BIG movies, unknow to a big mass of movie addicts. So, i support this! I am not gonna be a HUGE fan of this, but sometimes is good to see whats new in the board right?...
Cya and AMAZING site mates!
LONG LIVE TO MOVIES!

NOTkyle

I feel like everyone is missing the point here. Obviously if we want a real idea of whether or not to see a movie we're going to head to RT or IMDB. TwitCritics seem to just be a tool to gauge the average americans view of current films. I'm not going to go see Law Abiding Citizen because it has a 90% under their ratings, but I can laugh when I realize that people are just as stupid as I always assumed them to be.

Serris

I lost interest in this as soon as I saw that "Law Abiding Citizen" got 83%.

Mavi

lol the tweets for gamer just show how difficult this will be unless you tweet direct to them...

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