Site Review of the Week
Following on from last week’s theme (but hopefully a little less negative and more constructive). This week is TIOTI.com (tape it off the Internet). The company is a UK based startup and tries to be a more comprehensive wikipedia for TV shows, but with a social networking layer. It started out life with a good grounding and featured on TechCrunch in October 2006 but seems to have failed to find its niche and sadly quickly stagnated before being bought in December 2008 by Vizimo.
Problems
- Design - although innovative and fairly modern at the time, the site has suffered from the release of more and more features which has been badly integrated.
- It tries to be all things to all men - The original idea was ‘last.fm‘ for television however the site seems to not know its aim. It feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to achieve. Indeed, on many pages it looks like the only desire is to sell DVD’s through Amazon’s affiliate scheme.
- No community - the few discussions which are started on the pages for each show never really seem to take off. The pages seem to require a lot from users, asking them to write reviews and provide sources… to which most people’s response seems to be ‘why’?!
Good Things
- The site doesn’t seem to suffer from lack of features. There is plenty going on and plenty to do.
- The full catalogue of shows works well and seems to be auto-generated.
- The site integrates with Netflix (US only) allowing you to add your favourite shows to your Netflix queue when they become available.
Advice
- Identify the target market. What does this site want to be? Does it want to provide a catchup service, offer an alternative to piracy or encourage communities around shows and allow people to talk about it as they watch it? Either way it needs to taylor the site to this audience. Geotagging could allow the site to filter traffic too… meaning it could provide more useful and relevant information to its users (like when the shows air and when they are next on etc. )
- Integrate current sites and current API’s. Probably the best resource for this sort of media is the IMDB.com, so utilise the data and pull it in. Set up ‘hash tagging’ on Twitter for each show, meaning people can remark on the show away from the computer and allow further commenting on people’s observations. Pull in data on how well the show is doing in the ratings. How many people watched the show, and what the broadcaster expects from that slot which will make users feel a sense of loyalty to the show as people feel obliged to ‘tell their friends’ to encourage channels to keep airing episodes.
- Foster a community by implementing an incentive points system. Users respond to ‘credability’… more useful things gain more points (e.g. adding a source) etc. This will also engage people in a sense of competition and encourage them to post and check back on the site regularly.
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Tagged as Amazon.com, Business, Netflix, Social network, Social network service, TechCrunch, Television, Television program, Twitter, United Kingdom + Categorized as Commentary, Design, Reviews