Flickchart – Like Crack for movie fans (Try it before public launch)

If you’re an avid film fan Flickchart is for you – and readers of The Next Web can get signed up now ahead of its public launch next month by clicking here.

Flickchart has to be one of the most addictive sites I’ve ever used. Based around the idea of building up a chart of your favourite films of all time, it works by showing you two film posters – you click on the film you think is best of the two.

After that, another two films are displayed and you just keep clicking your favourite for each random pairing. As you go, Flickchart builds up a chart of your all-time favourite films.

It may sound dull but it’s actually incredibly addictive, made all the more so as the pairings can be incredibly bizarre – (The Little Mermaid vs Reservoir Dogs, for example) or incredibly close (Star Wars or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a difficult one for me). As you go you’re not only building up your own all-time film chart, you’re also contributing to an overall chart of Flickchart users’ favourite films.

Read on for an interview with Flickchart co-founder Nathan Chase, and for details of how to try it out now ahead of its public launch on 9th September.

When and how did Flickchart come about?
Flickchart was sparked by an off-handed comment in 2006 when the two of us were arguing about the movies on IMDb’s Top 250 list. Pulp Fiction was sitting 3 spots above The Empire Strikes Back in the top 10 (currently 5 spots above). We agreed that if everyone had directly compared them, rather than assigning star ratings to each one in a vacuum, things would’ve shaken out differently.

It seemed like a pretty fun way to build a list of your favorite films, and maybe truer than what you’d arrive at by only using star ratings. If The Empire Strikes Back and Pulp Fiction are both “5 stars”, which one’s the better movie? We opened the site for private beta by invitation only in May 2008, and started growing our userbase significantly in May 2009. We currently have over 23,000 users providing feedback by using the site and submitting bugs, suggestions, ideas, and support.

What has the reaction been from users so far?
The number one description from our users has been “addicting”. We’ve seen a lot of great response from many of our users who are discovering great films they’ve forgotten, finding out interesting things about their taste in movies they never realized, and enjoying perfecting and growing their lists. There’s also been no shortage of users cursing our name on Twitter when they’re struggling with a really tough matchup. It’s great to see that, because that’s exactly how we felt having to shoot down one favorite movie with another one.

Tell us about your latest features
We’ve recently expanded our ranking filters to include the ability to rank within all the movies you’ve already ranked, or to rank only movies you have yet to rank (in addition to subsets of your current Top 20, 50, 100, and 250). We added a significant amount of new genres to rank against, so you can now rank within some of the more specific and esoteric types of film in addition to more mainstream styles.

We’ve also expanded the Charts to include filtering by users – so with a couple clicks you can see what your friends’ favorite films of all time are, or see the list of your friend’s favorites from the 1980’s, or perhaps only Science Fiction movies from the 1980’s, or even Science Fiction movies from the 80’s by Steven Spielberg! You can also look at the bottom of the lists to see the worst movies in any combination. The possibilities to view your lists are increasing – and we’ll be adding even more to them in the future.

What are your aspirations for the service?
We hope to continue to grow our userbase and offer more ways for looking at your lists of favorite films, more ways to integrate with the rest of your social network through Facebook, Twitter, and the like, integration with movie watching services like Netflix and online video services, and a lot of other features to share and enjoy the site with your friends.

How about Flickchart for other areas of popular culture – music, TV, games etc?
Movies are just the beginning for us. We have made plans already to expand out to music, television, video gaming, and possibly others in the future. Of those, music will probably be the next venture – but also the hardest to implement given the sheer number of song, albums, and artists. We’re ready and excited to take on the challenge! We’ll certainly be looking to allow users to cross-reference their data as well – so that they might be able to show their true favorites across all media.

If you’d like to try the service out right now you can skip the queue by clicking on this special link for readers of The Next Web. Beware – Flickchart is scarily addictive once you get going…

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