All Consuming and Lists of Bests
The Robot Co-op has re-launched the Lists of Bests and All Consuming sites with new designs and all sorts of cross-site integration. You can now add lists to your, well, list of lists on Lists of Bests and as you check off items they are marked as consumed in All Consuming. So I went in and added the Academy Award Best Pictures list and started checking off the movies we’ve seen for the Great Oscar Project. As I marked each item it was added to my lists of consumed movies on All Consuming, and I could give each a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If I wanted to, I could go back over to All Consuming and add the dates when I finished each movie or a comment about each movie. I can also add All Consuming to my site with a piece of javascript.
However, even though I find the sites a lot of fun to use, I doubt I’ll make a habit of it. In my mind any site that allows me to rate and review media has to meet the Netflix test — Is the site as addictive and easy to use as Netflix’s friends features? The answer here is no. I can only give yes/no ratings to movies, I can’t easily share my lists, comments and ratings with friends. Other people are interesting, but I really want to share things with people that I know (and see what they’re up to as well).