TwitCritics: Rotten Tomatoes For The Twitterverse?

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.

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