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Site Blather, Social Media

Letterboxd

I broke down a couple weeks ago and joined Letterboxd, the social network for sharing your movie viewing activity and opinions. It’s caught on in a big way with a lot of movie writers and critics and has been in the news quite a bit recently, especially around the recent launch of its first iOS app.

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I’ve been using it to cross-post my After the Campaign reviews and followed a bunch of my favorite critics and others who are active there. But as I was setting up my account I had to laugh because it occurred to me that this was the latest iteration of an idea that seemed awfully familiar. It’s the same basic notion as Spout, the site I worked for briefly back in 2008/2009 that was built around the same concept, to give movie lovers a single place to get together and geek out about the movies they’re watching. That was pretty solidly focused on smaller movies but certainly expanded into blockbusters and more as well.

So why is history repeating itself? Because the social network space continues to shift and we’re in a much different place than we were in 2008.

When I was at Spout, Facebook and Twitter were pretty much it in terms of networks, at least for the mainstream user. The conversation then was whether a niche network was necessary or if it was better to just admit that those two big players were going to dominate the marketplace. And those two, particularly Facebook, won the battle at that time because it was showing you everything from everyone, so why maintain all kinds of different network profiles?

Now, though, we’re in a very different space. Facebook and Twitter are still elephants in the room but they have company in Pinterest, Instagram and other networks. More specifically, the value proposition on those networks has changed significantly. Pinterest is for ideas and research, Twitter is for news, Facebook is for Ice Bucket Challenge videos, Instagram is for pictures of food and Snapchat is for documenting that night out with your friends.

So now, in 2016, it makes sense to splinter movie-related activity off onto it’s own channel. That’s never going to make it into the Facebook feed and Instagram isn’t the right place for it. Twitter’s great, but it’s so fast moving and general that, well, there are other things it does better.

It caught on at this point also because of the overall media landscape. So many of the people who are writing about film on a regular basis don’t have a single outlet anymore, a big change from eight or so years ago. With freelance contributions spread across the web, Letterboxd gives them more or less a single point of contact for their reviews and other thoughts. Is it better than an owned blog? No, because Letterboxd could go the way of Spout any day now. Which is why I’m cross-posting there, not doing anything exclusive.

Still, I like the interface and other features at the site and will continue to use for the foreseeable future. There are certainly some features I’d love to see added but overall it does what it needs to do and shows me what the people whose opinions I’m interested in following are watching.

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