While building the recommendation feature for 24frames, I was faced with a difficult decision. It has been particularly exacerbated by the latest RealID scandal from Blizzard.
Now, I am not comparing myself in any way with Blizzard. But if recommendations are going to work, they need to come from people you know. And that means I need your name. More to the point – the people you want to send recommendations to need your name. Y’know, so they know who the emails are really coming from.
Anyway, your profile page now has two additional fields – firstname and surname. If you want any hope of using the recommendation feature you really should fill out those two fields.
Granted, full names are a dangerous thing to have flying around this big series of tubes, and as such I will only ever display names as Thomas M., for instance.
Anyway, what are you doing here … get over to 24frames and fill out those fields, so you’re ready for when the recommendation feature goes live.
Over the course of the next couple of days I hope to release the next feature in 24frames – recommendations.
Now, this feature won’t be a computed recommendation for you as a user. There is simply not enough data in the system to do that accurately enough to be useful yet.
No, this is a small button that let’s you send a recommendation to your friends.
It’s actually fairly simple. Click the button and you’re presented with a simple form where you can enter the recipients email-address and modify a small message (I’ve included a custom one for your convenience). The textarea for the message also has a few custom tags available, much like the Twitter message in your profile.
I’ve worked hard to incorporate a logical flow into the recommendation engine. It takes into account whether or not the email is registered with a user within 24frames. If that’s the case the given users preferences is taken into account.
The emails sent from the recommendation engine contain the following: your custom message, signed by your name, the title of the movie, a plot summary and the movies cover art. Finally it also contains an invitation to sign up to 24frames if the email address is not already registered with 24frames.
I sincerely hope this will help you share the movies you enjoy with friends and family. Let me know how it works out for you.
