Bookmark This! January 19, 2009 posted by Nigel

What to Rent – a very cool personalised movie recommendation service

whattorent small What to Rent a very cool personalised movie recommendation service

What to Rent is a very cool free movie recommendation service which asks a lot of left field type questions to build a profile of your tastes and then uses the profile to deliver movie suggestions on demand. Surprisingly the questions have nothing to do with movies per se, but are instead based on stuff like relationships and general attitudes.

You also tell it your mood and whether you want to watch something inside or outside your comfort zone, which adds a little more zest to the possibilities. It may sound weird but it really seems to work, the first two recommendations I got were for films I’d already seen and loved, and then a couple of very interesting choices popped up. Definitely worth bookmarking!

The site design is based around the relatively unknown LaBarrie Theory. The LaBarrie Theory states, “A movie viewer emotionally interacts with a film in the same manner that they interact with other human beings.” To utilize this theory, we first decipher a user’s personality and form a general model of how they react to the world and their average emotional state. Next, we establish a relationship between that personality and the movies in our database. The cluster then compares your ideal stimulus and current mood to the possible relationships with movies on file. The film that maximizes the desired criteria is recommended.

Tags: what+to+rent, movie+recommendation

About the Author:

Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don't we all?

Nigel – who has written 5201 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.

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http://www.jinni.com Phoebe

Nice overview. Whattorent is a very interesting site – and the non-movie-related questions create a great experience.
If you're in the mood to try out more movie recommendations, have a look at Jinni – we recently opened in private beta and offer search and recommendations from the Movie Genome.