Spoiler Alert / Joe Dunphy's Movie Reviews

You might have noticed that I seem to have given Flixster the heave-ho. That appearance might not be deceptive - I am seriously considering doing just that, as I write this. That site’s hyperaggressive “viral marketing” practices are no secret, and would seem to have been stepped up, recently, I find. On going to my page there, I found that my profile could only be viewed by those who had signed up, facing a signup form that all but demands that one yield one’s password to Yahoo or Google (this can be skipped) and will mass email one’s contacts, in one’s name, if one is so unwise as to violate the TOS at one of those services, and comply.

Not cool. As I’ve said elsewhere, I write to be read, not to help somebody else’s spam campaign, and this didn’t help. I certainly found myself glad that I hadn’t put Spoiler Alert on any rings, yet, because the lockdown effectively snipped my link back to Webring. The two reviews I had posted hadn’t found their way into the Flixster feed, which only accepts “new” reviews - and never mind the fact that the land of the lost review was posted only two months before I set up the Mybloglog community for that Flixster account, which found itself with nothing in the feed. The whole experience had become quite annoying by this afternoon.

So I went looking for a new place to post, and found my annoyance growing, as a series of places I found had signup procedures that, in one way or another, failed to work. Finally, I found blog.com, and saw only one problem with my plan to use it to replace Flixster - to do so would be a waste of a lot of good functionality. To have pages on a blog is a wonderful thing. I decided, instead, to use Blogs.com to replace IGN, and IGN to replace Flixster.

This might be slightly confusing for my subscribers, for about two to three seconds, but I think they’ll understand why I had to do this. As for Flixster - I’m not fond of kicking anybody to the curb, or throwing anything out that is of value. If Flixster chooses to improve its business practices, I’ll be glad to find some use for that old page, but really, that’s up to them. Or would that be “him”?

(originally posted to blog.com, Oct 16, 2009)