First steps
So, you have signed up at Filmaster or you're planning to do it and you're lost and don't know what is happening here? Well, you're on the right page because we're going to explain all this to you in simple words so that you can quickly decide whether or not it's worth to join our growing movie-lovers community.
If you don't want to read all this, we have a clear message to you, though. It's worth it. And here is why...
What is Filmaster?
Filmaster is a new social network for film buffs featuring personalized content and recommendations. And all that free as in beer and as in speech. Filmaster allows you to run your own movie blog in a great domain like you.filmaster.com, rate movies and talk about movies with people whose opinions you care about.
Filmaster is niche by design. We're not even thinking of competing with huge sites like IMDB or RottenTomatoes in terms of number of movies, trailers and page views. We're also not going against Flixter -- a kind of MySpace for movies. We chose the hard way. We're creating a place for real movie freaks -- people to whom film is not just entertainment. And we want to make Filmaster the first place on the web to discuss good movies with people who know what they're talking about.
The Features
We give you a "rating machine" so that you can quickly rate a lot of movies. This is a required first step. Based on your ratings we can suggest you new movies to watch and those you should better avoid. We are also able to suggest you new movie buddies (people with a similar taste to yours) to discuss your favorite movies with. As all the ratings are public, you instantly know who you are talking to.
But Filmaster is not only about rating and recommendations. Above all, it's about the comunity. Our users run movie blogs like this one: michuk.filmaster.com where all their activities are aggregated. The most interesting reviews show up on the front page to get proper attention. Everything else is aggregated on The Filmaster Planet, which lists the most recent posts, short reviews and comments of all users.
Data presentation is highly personalized as well: you can filter The Planet to only show the activities of your comrades or people with similar tastes. The movie ratings with short reviews are sorted especially for you so that on the top you always see those written by the people with a good taste in movies (i.e. same as yours!)
OK... but I wanna know more...
Good, we're happy to hear that! Especially for you have we set a FAQ page where we're listing the most frequently asked questions and try to answer them, Go there to find our more about the movie recommendations, organization of the content and the social features of Filmaster.
Who is running the show?
Filmaster has been created as an after hour project by two Python programmers: michuk and adz (find out more in the About section). We do not have an investor. We run the project by ourselves, with the help of the Filmaster developers and users community.
The community
As Filmaster is both free as in beer (you don't have to pay for it) and as in freedom (all content is licensed on Creative Commons, all code is free software) we have a growing community of developers that join us and implement new features for the project. If you know Python/django or want to help translating Filmaster into your language and perhaps run a localized version of the website, please head to Filmaster.org -- our community website and read about what you can help with. Everyone is invited!
