CyberTube

Last week we ran an open discussion of our project. The focus group of four people critically evaluated our idea and expressed their opinions how to extend and improve proposed system. Invited reviewers considered presented suggestion tool from different points of view: starting from required functionality and technical details and ending with social, legal and economic aspects. Below is a short description of the most interesting ideas and critics expressed during the meeting.

Critics

1. No ways to receive profit (possibly project is not attractive for real world investors);
2. Security and ethical issues (How much information about user preferences and visited places it should expose? Possibly, some users would like to hide information about visited places and who was with them at this time.)  ! However, these drawbacks are intrinsic to all social networks.

Suggestions

1. In order to improve the quality of recommendations system should memorize and analyze user’s preferences (notice what friends you follow more often, how you replied on received notifications: liked it or disliked, how you rated suggested movies and cinemas, etc.).  Benefits of this “tastes history”:
   – more personalized recommendations;
   – than longer user exploits an application than more relevant suggestions it delivers (extension to trust-based algorithm).
2. System should support reversing scenario: user is entering the place (cinema, for example) and application provides suggestions what are the best options to watch in this place. (“Here I am. What should I see?”)
3. It is possible that you and your friend have completely different tastes in movies, so making a group of friends with similar tastes was suggested. (We can also have a list of friends and rank them)
4. System should stimulate best contributors (discounts in cinemas, for example).
5. System should provide an opportunity to invite friends on future events (tag your friend if you want to go and watch a movie together).
6. System should be highly responsive.
7. System should be extensible.
8. Developers should think about ways, features which might be interesting for potential investors (advertisement, online movie purchases, etc.)

As we discussed the system should not depend on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is just a better way to get people and twit our friends.

Legal issues was another topic in our discussion. As we mentioned before the system allows its users to post their comments and reviews about cinemas. According to cinema policy, cinema can respond to user comments and asks to remove unfair reviews.

Geo locations, business part of the system and reliability were other concepts of our discussion.

Summary

Considering results of the discussion we can conclude that our “potential users”/reviewers were interested in proposed system and admitted that they would like to use such kind of suggestion tool. However, they pointed out that even though system has a social value it might be unnoticed by investors as it doesn’t provide good capabilities for receiving profit.

Finally, we would like to thank our “critics” for their system evaluation and suggestions. We have found this session very useful and got very good ideas about future concept evolvement. Moreover, we are going adjust our system functionality according to the received feedback and include some presented above suggestions in our application functionality list.