Flixster

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**Flixster**

URL	http://www.flixster.com/
Type of site	Online movie database
Available language(s):	English
Owner	Hannah Knapp
Created by
Current status	Active

Flixster is an online database of information about films and actors which includes social features such as the ability for individual users to review and rate films and to compare their ratings with invited friends to assess compatibility in film tastes.

Started in January 2006, the site administrators avoided heavy promotion until November 2006 in order to improve the service.^[1] Between November 2006 and January 2007, the number of daily page views by Alexa Toolbar users rose from fewer than 20 million per day to around 50 million per day.^[2]

As a consequence of this rise in popularity, the website has been discussed on numerous Internet blogs, with both positive^[3] and negative^[4] feedback. More mainstream commentators are also starting to mention the site.^[5]

1 Viral Practices
2 The Flixster Team
3 Feedback
4 References

[edit] Viral Practices

Flixster actively encourages users to invite friends using their hotmail, yahoo or gmail address books. The site DOES allow the user to select which friends from their address book to invite - but the default option is to invite all your friends and some users thus accidentally send a lot of invites they did not intend. While flixster has been criticized for being aggressive in encouraging users to invite friends, the practice of integrating with webmail address books is very common, and is used on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Yelp & many others.

[edit] The Flixster Team

The site is maintained by a group of administrators. These administrators oversee the forums to ensure suitable language and topics are used, control the movies and actors that are submitted and publish skins that users have made to make their pages interesting. There are many skins currently available, and more are constantly being added.

The Flixster Team consists of six administrators; Joe (the figurehead), Saran (self promoted), Eugene (the people's champ), Rodrigo (the wingdude), Steve (of questionable taste) and Hannah (the responsible one).

[edit] Feedback

Although Flixster has been praised for its copious amount of content,^[1] the social nature of the site has been criticised as leading to over-rating of bad films.^[4]