Movie Social Networking Sites

Movie Social Networking Sites

With the emergence of social networking sites, there has also been a small influx of a niche in this market - movies. Each one has its pros and cons as they relate to the future and where to go in the future. Below is a detailed look at each one.

IMDB.com: The perfect movie information site. It has virtually every director, actor, writer, movie, tv movie, year released known to man. The site is quoted more times than any other movie site. Often, the information found here is considered law. Its social network side of things is a little blah and lacks a lot to be desired. It has a few login features and some list generation, but other than that it is nothing to get excited about - especially something you and your friends would want to get involved with. The overall outlook of the site is incredibly promising. It has everything that is needed for a movie site, and could easily incorporate a few more interactions with the social side of things.

RottenTomatoes.com: A monster movie review site. It has all the critical reviews compiled for each movie. It does a great job of getting people into or out of the theater with an idea of how good the movie will be. It also provides some info for release dates, actors etc. But, for social networking it lacks a little something. It does have some movie list functions and some message boards to keep people interested in coming back signed in. But, there is no substance or nothing really pushing you to interact.

Flixster.com: A newer true social networking site dedicated to movies. Users can do all sorts of stuff as well as recommend movies, rate movies, review them, and talk with friends. The movie information is there as well. But, it doesn't push you to come back to the site. It has some nice features, but most users frequent the site for a short time never to return. It does have a facebook application, but how much it draws users to the site is unknown. Some call this the myspace of movie social networking - this was the first.

YMDB.com (shompy): Old, outdated, and not frequented much. It has one feature - movie lists. Users can fairly easily create a top movie list, explain why they think it is good, then chat with a few friends who may stumble across their list. It has no movie reviews, no true social interaction, and nothing intuitive. It is a one and done site that never really generated revenue. No one knows how it is able to keep a float. It is possible to get some knowledge about non English films.

Spout.com: This little site has a decent amount of movie information and some cool tools. It finally has some type of movie review feature although all it really is is a blog attached to it. The design is nice and the people seem nice as well. It lacks social interaction and a bug free site. I enjoyed looking for movie via an instant movie search, but it was buggy. It had some good movie list functions and a way to look at hot or not films. In the end though it was a confusing site that most will not go back to many times.

FilmCrave.com: A very young but ambitious social networking site. It lacks a strong movie database (though it looks like it is growing), some social interaction, and a solid heart. What it does have is almost everything else. Strong movie reviews, intuitive movie list creation, enough social networking, and potential. It is less than a month old by the looks of it so it is not known where it will go or grow, but everything looks promising.

YahooMovies.com: A very large part of yahoo is yahoo movies. They have movie reviews, movie lists, recommendations, critics, and number ones. They pretty much have it all. It is not focused or very intuitive. It is a site that can be used once in a while or very often. It has great movie data but as far as social interaction it may be too spread out to get users to enjoy the company of others. It looks like it is mostly used for movie reviews.

As you can see, most sites have good and bad points. It is up to you to decide if any or all of them are worth joining. I find it easier to join all of them then come back to the ones that I feel like I need to come back to. Some day, one of these sites will do all of them combined better than anyone else. Currently, it looks like it could be flixster or filmcrave.

by Alex Olson
Keyword : Movie Social Networking Sites

Rewarding Expired Domains

Rewarding Expired Domains

Reap the rewards from other people's hard work. Often a difficult goal, but this is exactly what you can achieve with expired domains.

Broadly speaking, the life cycle of an expired domain has been:

1 - the domain is registered 2 - a website is built on the domain 3 - the domain is promoted 4 - the domain receives visitors 5 - the domain is not re-registered and the domain expires

Once the domain expires, visitors will still arrive at the domain, only to see that there is no website there any longer. These visitors could be visiting your website.

A lot of effort goes into building a website. And as any web site owner will tell you, getting visitors to your site is a long hard struggle. But if you can register a domain that already receives visitors, this gives you valuable a head start.

Finding one of these visited expired domains can be tricky, and then actually registering them before anyone else manages to can be even harder. There are several websites that specialize in grabbing these domains on your behalf, and some list the domains that are about to expire in the next few days. You can go through this list of domains, and find any with names that seem relevant to your chosen topic.

With this shortened list of domains, you can then conduct research into each domain. The most important thing to check is to see how many backlinks they have - ie how many websites link to each domain. On many search engines, using the phrase "link:" (note the colon) before the full domain URL will return the number of links pointing at a given domain. For example, type in something like link:http://www.domain.com (note that in most cases you shouldn't use any spaces). In general, the more backlinks there are, the more visitors the domain will receive.

There are several other checks that can be carried out on a domain, but finding the number of backlinks is generally the most important.

Once you have found a domain you like, you then need to register it the moment it becomes available - before anyone else does. I would strongly recommend using one of the many websites that offer this service - they have the know-how and beating them to the registration could be a hard task. Also, some of these services have exclusive rights to re-register the domain before anyone else so it may not be possible to grab the domain by yourself.

Your next step should be to check out the different services, and see if any of them have exclusivity on your chosen domain. If none of them do, then chose the services you like the look of and get them all to chase the domain on your behalf. Most of these services will only charge you if they manage to get the domain on your behalf.

You may need to go through this process several times before you successfully register an expired domain that matches your criteria. As you can imagine this may take up a lot of your time.

I can recommend using another service in this field - there are several website out there that can carry out the legwork for you. They list the domains that are about to expire, along with the number of backlinks, and search engine rankings. They are well worth taking a look at.

by Dominic Dat
Keyword : Rewarding Expired Domains