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theriex / membic

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Convenience search links #14

Closed theriex closed 11 years ago

theriex commented 11 years ago

When reading a review from a friend, it is sometimes natural to search for the item at a general review archive. For example if a friend reviews a movie, you might look it up on IMDb (or RottenTomatoes or whatever) for more details or a second opinion. It could be helpful to place convenience search links under the "Your Review"/"Remember" buttons.

theriex commented 11 years ago

Reviews have an associated link that you can click to go to the item. Adding multiple supplemental links beyond that starts to get kind of scattered (and potentially cluttered). Convenience search links involving an API might lead to fairly constant catch-up and maintenance coding, and without an API the results might not be so good if the title info from the original review isn't clean data. There is potential confusion between the main link and supplemental search links if they both point to the same site.

The larger issue is how friend opinions relate to global opinions. If IMDb says the movie sucks, but your friend says it's great, what do you do? If IMDb says it's great and your friend says it sucks, what do you do? If you generally follow your friend's advice in both cases then is it even worth looking it up in IMDb? Would having an IMDb convenience search link provide any kind of reliable indication of how often IMDb was consulted in addition to MyOpenReviews? Is that worth potential UI crowding? Should these searches be configurable in the user settings so we don't display links a user doesn't want to see? It's too early to know if this would be a good thing, or worth the added complexity.

Another related issue is preferred sourcing. My guess is that eventually a user would prefer quick jumps to wherever they get their content from. For a movie the user might prefer to get it from Netflix, Amazon, iTunes or TPB. MyOpenReviews might have an affiliation with Amazon, and doesn't want to invite trouble linking through to TPB. Netflix may have removed API support for automatically adding to their queue. Then there's secondary qualifications like whether something is available for streaming. People are adept at navigating their preferred sourcing, but it is difficult to automate. My preference would be to focus efforts on the URL readers and app plug-ins for now.