Fflick: When Rotten Tomatoes Hooked Up with Twitter

Roger Ebert, the movie critic to end all movie critics, wrote a hefty blog post in April touting our social media-saturated times as 'The golden age of movie critics.' It was a bold claim, one that went against the thinking of many of his colleagues, who argued that the everyone-has-a-voice nature of our society 2.0 was dampening the authoritative voice of the professional film critic. Ebert wrote that "Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about more films." The 'better' part is questionable, but the 'more' part is not. Case in point, the new website fflick.

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Approximately nine months ago, Rotten Tomatoes and Twitter met at a club, made eyes, took a few dozen shots together, went home, and made beautiful binary love together. The result is fflick, an aggregator of tweets related to current and upcoming movies. The movies are graded based on the general tone of the conversation, and as always, celebrities get priority, as their movie-related tweets are heavily featured throughout the site (Al Gore thinks Inception is “great"). It’s also provides a good look into how far movies have penetrated the zeitgeist. There are 818,270 tweets about Inception, and 9,417 about The Social Network. So while some professional movie critics may be weeping at the sound of their voice fading further into oblivion, the rest of us get to rely on a bunch of strangers and famous people to find out which movies we should be streaming online. Hooray for internet!