Rate my startup - deegr

With a couple of Uni friends, we have been working on http://www.deegr.com for the past few months; it's a cultural recommendation engine that lets you find people with similar tastes on the whole Web.

From the landing page, just rate 5 movies you either like or hate. deegr instantly searches through over 60k+ user profiles we've referenced on websites such as IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, or AlloCine (and deegr itself!), to show you the 30 people that best match your tastes and give you inspiration based on the rest of what they've also liked. The more you rate, the better the accuracy of your search!

You can also follow your own Facebook/Twitter crowd, share micro-reviews, interact with other deegr members and a few other things after a free, flash-registration.

The purpose of this project is to create a generic recommendation engine for pretty much anything that has ratings (or the equivalent) on the Web.

We'd love to have your thoughts and suggestions on it: the idea, the UI, the quality of the recommendations, the speed of the engine... Anything.

If you also have suggestions regarding blogs & sites we should get in touch with so they can spread the word about deegr, don't hesitate!

Thanks all,

The deegr Team http://www.deegr.com

ps: other medias (music, books, videogames...), the API and mobile apps are on the roadmap; just give us a few months!

EDIT: Please note that we're currently working on a small feature that will enable you to minimize mainstream movies in a single click, in our recommendations! We know you've most probably seen Shawshank Redemption and the Godfather ;)

What happens if you ask people to rate 10 movies with either a thumbs up or thumbs down? Would that give better results?

It's quite interesting, although I could see more use for it as part of other websites. EG: dating websites could use the tech to match people?

Good Luck though!

Well, we will see how things evolve. You are correct in that it seems like people are more likely to give 5/5's than lower ratings; but I guess that's just one way of matching people: they can be similar in their way of rating things (they could love everything or be big time haters), deegr will match them. Also, it's not like we can't interpret ratings over 3/5 as thumbs-ups and lower ratings as thumbs-down; we can still change, only time will tell us what the best scale is. As of now, the current system seems to do a great job.

And yes, of course, we're thinking a lot about implementing it on other websites; we're already working on an API ;)

Thanks for the feedback!

* 2 and * 3: the left side shows your different matchs' ratings (what they've liked, what they haven't). The right side shows a reorganized summary of all the movies liked by the 30 people whose tastes best match yours. It's all explained when you hover your cursor over the top of that column ;)

* Yes, we've thought about that. I can't tell yet if we're going to work on that soon or not; it would be pretty easy since we've crawled the profiles already, but that's kind of unfair to the other websites, it feels like we'd be stealing profiles - whereas right now, we only reference them.

* 'You both rated' helps you have a quick glance at how well you and the person in question have in common. We've tried without it, and quite frankly, it's better with; juste to know on what kind of movies you both match. The number in parenthesis is the total number of movies in common with similar ratings.

* ^^

* Woopsie! We'll fix that asap!

* Yeah, it's not the first time we're told the Recommendation Summary shows some mainstream movies. Well that's because they've liked a lot, so pragmatically, we HAVE to recommend them; and if you liked/hated them, rate them away!

HOWEVER please note, we're only weeks away from an update that will allow you to hide Mainstream recommendation in a single click, so please be patient!

Thanks again for that full review! And don't forget: the more you rate, the better the accuracy.

I actually found a new movie that related to the ratings I supplied, nor have I seen it before, good stuff.

Here are some thoughts:

1. I've feed Netflix a lot of my data over the years. A link from each movie to a Netflix result would show how Netflix rates it related to me. Maybe you don't want to push people to Netflix, but it's useful information to me.

2. I don't really care about the "people" I care about the movies. As I click through the results I see a lot of duplicate movies under different people. Remove or leave the people category, I don't care, but strip away the duplicate results...

All in all I find it useful.