TwitCritics: Tweet Your Own Movie Rating

Since you’re reading Screen Rant, I’m going to safely assume you’re a movie fan. That’s a given, right? That said, do you have a Twitter account? And if so do you use it to Tweet what you think about the latest movies? “Transformers sucked!” “Zombieland is the best movie of the year!” “Spider-Man 3 was such a disappointment!” and so on and so forth. Well, if you do use Twitter at least partly for that purpose, you might be interested in the latest Twitter-related website that has launched called TwitCritics.com.

So what is it? Well, it’s pretty simple, really: TwitCritics is basically the Rotten Tomatoes of Twitter, but taking the opinions of average movie fans instead of movie critics. Basically it searches through all Tweets that have keywords related to a particular movie, and then compiles a percentage rating of how many are positive and negative. So in the header image you see Couples Retreat sitting at 72%, which doesn’t mean that it gets a rating of 72 out of 100, but rather that out of the total amount of “reviews” Tweeted for Couples Retreat, 72% of that total were positive. If you’re familiar with the aforementioned Rotten Tomatoes it works in pretty much the same way.

The About page of TwitCritics, heck even the header, says that the site is still in the beta stage, with some inevitable kinks yet to be worked out. For example, the site isn’t 100% accurate in judging the Tweets as positive or negative, which is down to the wording of a particular user: for example, they may mention Surrogates in their Tweet, but not actually be saying something bad about it, but rather commenting on someone else’s positive/negative Tweet telling them why they’re wrong. That would probably lead the site to think that particular Tweet was negative, when in fact it wasn’t.

Still not completely sure how TwitCritics works? Well, to help you out, here’s an example of a specific movie, the ratings it received on Twitter, and a selection of the actual Tweets used to calculate the rating:

I can only see the site getting more accurate as it develops, particularly since it already has the much-needed feature that allows you to correct a certain rating (indicated with “Mistake?” on the above image). Since Twitter is in real-time, it allows for perpetual moderation of opinion by everyone who uses Twitter. That’s a good thing if users use it correctly and don’t abuse it. There will always be some out there, of course…

I’m actually surprised a Twitter-related site like this hasn’t been created before – perhaps someone has finally noticed the growing influence of Twitter in creating positive/negative buzz. And TwitCritics will only make that grow, making it easier for Twitter users to work out which movies they should see that weekend. I’ll certainly be keeping it on my radar to see how it turns out – if it works as it’s supposed to, I’ll add it to my list of websites I visit daily.

What do you think of TwitCritics? If it works out as intended, would you use it regularly? Or is it a pointless feature that won’t take off?

As stated, TwitCritics is still in the beta stage at the moment, but you can still try it out. Just head to the TwitCritic website, search for a particular movie and see what people are saying about it.

Source: Twitcritic and /Film