Filmaster is a new social network for film buffs that features personalized content and recommendations. What makes it special is that it is an open service: both code and content is free as in freedom.

Bias warning: Author of this article is one of the founders of Filmaster. At the same time he’s the founder of PolishLinux.org.


Filmaster — Main page

Why create yet another movie site?

That’s a valid question. And the answer to it can be summed up in the following points:

  • Film rankings are useless!
    Have you ever checked out the movie ratings at IMDB or RottenTomatoes and wondered “how on Earth could this crappy movie have such a high score?”. Wonder no more as Filmaster suggests you the movies that you will enjoy. It personalizes rankings using a custom recommendation algorithm, so that the Top 100 is prepared for each user individually based on their weird tastes.
  • Movie websites are not social enough!
    On Filmaster you can blog about movies (and you’re getting a cool URL for your blog like michuk.filmaster.com), discuss movies on forums, make friends and follow their activity, check your and their ratings and compare your movie tastes using the taste comparison indicator, share your movie libraries or wishlists and much more…
  • All movie sites are proprietary
    You don’t own your data at IMDB or Flixter. The companies behind those websites do. And they can disconnect you from your data at any given time. It’s all in the convoluted terms of use. Filmaster is free as in freedom. You own your data. You control your data. And you can do whatever you want with it. What is more, you can also use the code that runs the service as it’s fully free as well, being a mixture of BSD licensed stuff (mainly borrowed from the Pinax project guys) and Affero GPLv3 (all the original Filmaster code including the recommendations engine). What can you do with it? Well… sky is the limit.


Planet Filmaster aggregates all user activities

Filmaster as an open service

Implemented in Django (a Python framework) and using a PostgreSQL database engine, Filmaster was made possible by using strictly free software. The decision to open source the code of the service itself came a few months after the development started. It became clear to the project founders, Borys Musielak and Adam Zielinski, that making Filmaster fully free software will enable the project to grow much faster and gain a wider range of features compared to proprietary websites offering similar recommendations functionality like Jinni.com, Criticker.com or ClerkDogs, not to mention a popular movie social network Flixter.com.

But the code is only one part of a fully open service. According to the Open Service Software Definition, an open software service is one:

  • Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition with the exception that where the data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the user
  • Whose source code is:
    • Free/Open Source Software (that is available under a license in the OSI or FSF approved list).
    • Made available to the users of the service.

This is why all the content created by the users at Filmaster.com is automatically licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and that is why the team is working hard to provide an API that will make it possible to trivially access all the essential data, like user ratings, reviews, personal recommendations, wishlists, collections and all the rest using simple JSON calls.

How can you help?

Easily. Check out Filmaster.org, the developer’s community wiki, get an account at the issue tracker, set up the environment (which shouldn’t take more that 15 minutes if you follow the set up instructions precisely) and get going!

There is a lot of cool stuff going on at the moment, mainly thanks to our great contributors:

  • Jakub is working an an enhanced version of the recommendations engine. Feel free to comment on his conception described on the wiki as New recommendation engine.
  • Witold is planning to migrate the code base from Subversion to Git in order to make it easier to manage and provide a better tool for a distributed coding project like this.
  • Turin is working on enhancing the search features, tagging and a single page to follow all the answers to your posts and reviews.
  • And you may take one of other cool planned features like the integration with TV programme and local cinema schedules, adding a ClerkDogs-like “film DNA” feature, e-mail/SMS notifications about upcoming shows that are on user’s wishlists and many more, perhaps just the ones that you think that are missing from the roadmap.

But… I can’t code! Am I useless?

Quite the opposite! There are fortunately many things that you can do if you can’t help us programming:

  • Translate Filmaster to your native tongue! We have two language versions at the moment: English (launched at May 24th) and Polish (running in beta since January 2009). You can create the one for your language and either work with us or set up your own instance of the service and work independantly. The power of open source, that is!
  • Become a moderator of the English version of the website. There are thousands of things that need to be done manually, like tagging the movies, editing the official movie descriptions, correcting the current data and many more. You don’t need to do all :>, just a little help will do. With a strong community we can do amazing things, I assure you.
  • File bugs if you find them, suggest new features and — what is most important — advertise the website to your friends, so that they can join and help us well!

OK, but… where is the catch?

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is none. We are simply film buffs ourselves and we think that the current websites are not good enough so we decided to change that by creating our own that will be more social, more personalized and completely free at the same time. With an open service like Filmaster this can happen and we very much hope you will like the idea and join us!

Even if you don’t feel like doing much work, just sign up sign up and use the website. Rate some 20+ movies and wait for the recommendations to arrive. They may surprise you as they are actually pretty good even at this early stage. And if you would like to share your opinion about the movies you love and hate either by leaving a short note or a longer review, we would be even more delighted to see that happening!

Contact us

The information provided here is not good enough? Just contact us and ask for more!

The best way to contact us is via Jabber. Just send a message to me (michuk@jakilinux.org) or Adam (adz@jakilinux.org) and we can talk about what we can do together. You can also leave us an e-mail — the addresses are the same. Everyone is invited to join and I hope we can quickly gather quite a numerous community of movie and software geeks and their friends to work together on this exciting project.

By the way, kudos to the founders of Identi.ca, Wikidot.com and Libre.fm for inspiration and great kudos to the Pinax project that made Filmaster possible to arrive as fast! Free software and free content is a great thing and keep doing your great work, please!

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