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Media-organizer Blippr public and packed with new features

Written on 25th July 2008 5 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Blippr recently removed invite-only requirements and entered into public beta, launching with the latest release a number of new features and a complete redesign. My colleague Ernst-Jan pointed out that the service allowed users to recommend things like music and films by writing reviews or rating them, when he reviewed the site in February. I wondered, so what is the deal with Blippr? I am accustomed of listing them online on IMDB for years now, and browsed around the site rather pre-judged, only to be surprised with the web 2.0 ’schwing’ that Chris and Jonathan added to the media reviewing concept.

Pro’s:

I have been listing my favorite movies on IMDB’s ‘my-movie’ service for years, but recently started thinking of quitting since IMDB started asking money for their premium services. Blippr is totally free, and seems to generate income from sending people to Amazon to buy all the media their friends recommend.
Blippr is not just another social network, they currently allow users to integrate within the context of other social networks. Currently, the application allows users to post their ‘blips’ with Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook.
The site allows users to import lists from Amazon’s wishlist, Goodreads and Librarything.

Con’s:

I wasn’t surprised to find out that IMDB doesn’t allow users to export their data. But a web 2.0 service like Blippr should support open data! I can’t export my carefully entered data.
From my top ten movies, five were found! The site has difficulties with foreign movies, something IMDB has covered with the wide spread community. Can’t they integrate the titles from IMDB?

I would recommend to check the site out, at least to see the great reviews of different media. And with some effort, the site is able to recommend you with some new media for this weekend!

Media organizer Blippr public and packed with new features

5 Comments »

About the author: Joop Dorresteijn Joop is writing to us from Seoul, South-Korea. Besides sniffing around for the latest LG and Samsung innovations, he reports from the emerging start ups from this country. He also works with new media for ING Life, the multinational insurance firm from the Netherlands. Want to see more? See his HDR pictures and blog from Korea and subscribe to his Twitter account here.

5 comments/trackbacks to “Media-organizer Blippr public and packed with new features”

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By Frank Herrman on Jul 25, 2008

As far as I know it’s very expensive to get connected to the IMDB database. Grabbing it from the web might get you into trouble…

I have tested blippr a couple of days during the closed beta. I did like it, but forget to use it. I guess it has more value when you can integrate it with services like iGoogle or social networking websites which you visit a bit more often.

Reply
By Jonathan C on Jul 25, 2008

Joop, thanks so much for the post! Regarding the “cons” you have listed…

1. We actually do allow you to export your data via our API, or the RSS feeds we make available to you on your profile. We’ll be making more data available to export and call via the API soon as well.

2. We are definitely looking to integrate more data from foreign Amazon sources. Look out for that in the nearish future.

Thanks again!

Reply
By Chris Heald on Jul 25, 2008

Glad you’re liking it so far, Joop! I did want to address your cons real fast, though!

Indeed, we do have those two issues to some degree. However, your data is available via export from our web services API, and we’ll be adding things like CSV export for your lists shortly. We absolutely believe that you should own your data, and it should go with you anywhere you want. If there’s a specific format you’re looking for, please do let us know!

Second, yeah, we’re working on the database-of-movies thing. IMDb’s Terms of Service prohibit screen scraping, and licensing their content is rather expensive for a startup of our size, so we haven’t gone that route yet. we’re trying quite hard to stay above board and only pull data from sources that make their data explicitly available.

Instead, we’re backed by Amazon’s data, so any time you perform a search that comes up empty, you can click the “external search” option provided, and we’ll hit Amazon and see if we can find the title you wanted. You’ll be able to add titles to our database from there, even if Amazon doesn’t know about them.

Again, thanks for the feedback, and keep blipping!

Edit: Hah, Jonathan got here before me. :)

Reply