netzooid

In a post a while back I said that there is an expectation now for several things in web applications: social interactions, RSS, and tagging. Spout.com is a website which some of friends just launched which is bringing these together in an interesting way. (Take that as a disclaimer! )

Spout, I believe, aims to be a community of people who love films. It brings these people together through social interfaces, tagging, and blogs. For instance, It allows you to form ad-hoc groups of people. For instance, I was recently invited to a group called the SNL Alumni Foundation. Its a cool series of lists and discussions about former SNL cast members. Hone in on the Farley File and find Chris Farley’s movies. Want to be notified of updates? Subscribe to the feed. Or participate in discussions about the movies. One of the more interesting groups I ran into was the knitting group – for those who love knitting and movies that contain knitting scenes… I don’t think I’ll comment on that though.

Spout has also taken the tagging thing and run with it. Interestingly, tags on spouthave taken on a more verb form, like the Loved-It tag as opposed to the simple adjectives people use now days (like just “good movie”). The tags also let people form ad-hoc movie lists. I’ve always been a big fan of the lists at Amazon, but they’re usually controlled by one person. But via tagging people can form their own lists, like the niche list 6th-grade-sleepovers.

I kind of feel that Spout is like an Amazon meets Flickr meets MySpace. This is their first step out there and it’ll be interesting to see where they go. I know the team has a lot of ambitions to bring good films to people and have a lot of ideas on how to do it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Random.