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Jinni is a new movie search and recommendation engine which gives you all sorts of criteria on which to request recommendations. You can browse movies by plot, period, mood, even the amount and type of praise the film received on first showing. It’s all wrapped up in a jazzy little interface which while not really to my taste (just a tad too cluttered) does the job well enough.
The main issue I have with the site mainly has to do with content, or rather the apparent lack of it. The service is new and still behind closed doors in private beta, so it’s perhaps a little unfair to single out the fact that the movie results tend to be mainstream stuff which you’re likely to have seen anyway (even after having spent time filling out the taste type tests to focus on your likely faves). But I’ll mention it anyway, if only as a counterpoint to the surprising and sometimes delightful choices offered up by the much simpler whattorent.com service I mentioned a while back.
Where whattorent is sparse to point of Spartanism (main menu – get new picks, see old picks), Jinni is as lavish as a Busby Berkeley musical with a positively bewildering number of options, settings, data and features. At times it’s almost too much. Less really is more in this case. Anyway, it’s a sterling effort for all that, and clearly the developers have put in a ton of work to get such a sophisticated result, so I’ll just leave it at that. I’ve got 10 invites if anyone wants to take a sneak peek.
Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies. More about the Movie Genome. Jinni isn’t a social network, it’s an internet application designed to fit how people relate to movies and TV. And since conversation is part of that, we’ve created tools to meet people with shared tastes, compare preferences, and review and rank titles.
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 5161 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.
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