Flickchart, the movie comparison site that has film buffs ranking their all-time favorites, for any decade, genre and many other ways to debate cinema, is inches away from taking Movieweb to court for "a rather obvious duplication of the concept, functionality, user interface, and formatting" of their site. An 11-page legal brief from Flickchart's lawyers to Movieweb, submitted Thursday, alleges theft, infringement and "a complete lack of any attempt by Movieweb to conceal its wrongdoing".

The legal brawl was sparked following the introduction of a feature on Movieweb's site called "Face-Off" last Saturday, April 16th, which they called "the coolest movie ranking app yet". Similar to Flickchart, the Face-Off feature let users rank movies in terms of which they thought was best, have head to head "face-offs" between favorites, and the ability to compare tastes with other users. All of these are features highlighted by Flickchart since the site debuted in 2009.


(Side Note: The initial post on Flickchart was on this blog in May of 2009)

Flickchart's founders, Nathan Chase and Jeremy Thompson, are not taking kindly to the new competition. The next day, April 17th, Chase posted a link to Movieweb's new offering on Twitter, saying, "Well, I guess they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?" By Monday April 18th, Chase posted a series of thumbnails comparing Flickchart to MovieWeb's Face-off on FriendFeed, the social service aggregator owned by Facebook, and said "we've already contacted our lawyer."

The series of thumbnails in that post, and the blog post issued Friday, April 22, draw up a clear parallel in terms of features and display from Flickchart and the new Face-off, including feature set, wording, placement, graphics, social site integration, and more. While it's entirely possible to create a similar site either in parallel or inspired by competition, the direction seems like a clear duplication of the Flickchart service.

The legal missive spares little in its wording saying "Movieweb has stolen the fruit of years of work... in such a blatant manner that, quite frankly, shocks the conscience." The filing reports the copying is fed in no small manner by the direct copying by one of Movieweb's employees, as it states "a managing editor of Movieweb registered an account with Flickchart in December 2009, and has logged in as recently as April 6, 2011." This would have been 10 days prior to the launch of Face-off, making any argument that Movieweb was unaware of Flickchart's similar functionality appear dead on arrival.

The brief says Face-Off! "would not exist" had it not been for the reproduction, duplication and copying of Flickchart, which violates the site's terms of service. If Face-Off! is not immediately removed from the site, Flickchart anticipates filing suit "to seek statuatory damages, actual damages, punitive damages, disgorgement of Movieweb's profits, injunctive relief and an award of attorney's fees and costs." Deadline was given for Face-Off's removal by 5 PM Pacific time on Friday April 22nd, and that deadline has since passed, with Face-Off! remaining up and running.

The full brief, hosted by Google Docs, is below:

Last year, I highlighted ten top Web services that debuted in the year, from Socialmedian to BackType and Feedly. Not an all-encompassing list, blogging colleague Robert Scoble asked if "I was right", adding on a few of his own.

With 2009 coming to a close, I thought it made sense to highlight some of my own personal favorites which are gaining traction. Keep in mind that I am not ranking these services necessarily in a most important to least important order, and I am ignoring some other top services (for example, Foursquare, which launched in March, or some Zynga properties), due to my own non-use.

As with 2008, many services debuted in 2009 that were not stand-alone services, but instead, hooked into existing environments, like Twitter and Facebook, or the iPhone.

1) Pubsubhubbub

2009 was all about real-time and moving data more quickly from place to place. No technology or service better epitomized that than Pubsubhubbub, an open protocol engineered from a team of Googlers who were looking to accelerate the delivery of updates between services with near-zero latency. Pubsubhubbub's simplicity and clear benefits resulted in many major services adopting it and virtually eliminating the expected wait times for aggregators and readers to get updates, while also reducing the need for said aggregators to repeatedly poll content sources.

Pubsubhubbub, adopted by Blogger, FeedBurner, Cliqset, FriendFeed and many others, also spurred into action the launch of Dave Winer's RSSCloud, adopted by Wordpress for similar purposes. The launch of Pubsubhubbub also fed the growth of Superfeedr, an increasingly popular utility that aims to deliver real-time notifications via the cloud.

2) Google Wave

Google Wave made a huge splash in 2009. (Review) If you weren't trying it out and aiming to find out what value it actually brought, it was probably because you were begging for an invite and hadn't found one yet. The real-time collaboration tool was mischaracterized by many who thought it could replace e-mail, or different social networks' activity, and it hasn't found too many people relying on it as a core service yet, but its innovation has many looking to see what the end game looks like.

3) Square

Although extremely new, Jack Dorsey's follow-up to Twitter, Square, is very alluring. A simple hardware add-on to the iPhone (and in the future, other mobile devices), Square lets any individual accept credit card transactions, verifies the purchaser, and provides the purchaser with an electronic record of the activity via their Web site.

Dorsey and team skillfully looked at a daunting world of differing devices and managed to find the commonalities between them (an audio port to be specific) and delivered something that could potentially change the game for small merchants and individuals, providing true mobile commerce that doesn't require cash.

4) Echo

The launch of JS-Kit's Echo product was such a big move for the company that they changed their name to reflect it. Echo, recognizing the sea change evident in social media that has moved much of the discussion of content away from core blogs, aggregated downstream activity at the host blog, including retweets and other social network reactions.

In addition, Echo brought real-time to everyone's comment stream, turning a once static entity into a live chat room. You can see Echo in action on popular sites including those from Brian Solis and 1938media.

5) my6sense

With more data coming in from more sources than ever, it is unlikely that most people are following fewer people or feeds at the end of 2009 than they were at the beginning of the year. Combined with a rise in mobile Web access, and you can see how my6sense's digital intuition for RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook makes sense, surfacing relevant data that is customized just for you.

The company has an iPhone app available, free, now, and has publicly promised that Android development is planned in the short term. Keep in mind that I am helping to advise the service, but I have been impressed with their offering, and see the issue of curation as one that many services will tackle in 2010.

6) Brizzly

Brizzly, a product from Thing Labs, is one of the more novel approaches to consuming one's Twitter and Facebook streams. The first to enable in-line viewing of images and video, the addition of customized trend definitions and novel approaches to direct messages and multiple account support, Brizzly is a compelling Web-based alternative to the standard interface from Twitter and competing clients, such as Seesmic.

Earlier in the year, Thing Labs also introduced Plinky, which while cute, doesn't look to be setting the world on fire.

7) Lazyfeed

For a technology supposedly on its last legs, RSS sure had a lot of very interesting innovation in 2009 (See also: Pubsubhubbub and my6sense). Lazyfeed came on the scene this summer with a real-time approach to feed discovery and the ability to follow several topics at once. A live interface and rapidly displayed content has made the product easily among the most fun ways to take in a lot of information, while keeping things "lazy".

With the slowing of central directories like Technorati, Lazyfeed became one of the best sites for me to use to find new sources who were discussing topics I was interested in, letting me add them to my reading list.

8) Flickchart

In May, Flickchart introduced a site for comparing your favorite movies, across time, genres, or even against your previous picks. Although simple, the "pick your favorite" approach became very addicting, and the site now sports more than 40,000 registered users, who have contributed more than 60 million rankings. (See blog post)

One of the unexpected side benefits of Flickchart for me was finding top movies rated by friends which I had never seen, which spurred me to finally add them to my iTunes or NetFlix.

9) Lunch.com and Simler

I am combining both Lunch.com and Simler, as both sites seem to be in their growth stages, and have similar goals - helping you to find interesting people who share the same interests. Lunch.com asks you for your spheres of interests, and to rank specific items on a -5 to +5 scale. In contrast, Simler asks you to add tags that describe your interests, and links you with those others who have also added the same tags.

Both Lunch.com and Simler suggest that you post new items to topic-oriented pages, and engage in discussion with others in your network. Lunch.com seems to be more product-oriented, while Simler is more focused on more abstract things, such as television, music and technology. Simler, like my6sense, is a client of Paladin.

10) Tweetie

If Brizzly was included, it also makes sense that Tweetie makes the list, even if it has no specific Web-only interface. Tweetie has become the gold standard for Twitter clients on the iPhone, and was among the first to incorporate many of the advanced capabilities introduced by Twitter, including Lists, geolocation, and retweets. Tweetie also has a solid Macintosh version, which I use often.

Also on this year's list but outside of the top 10:
Blippy, Cadmus, Cliqset, Gowalla, Salmon, Twazzup

What did I miss, overlook or understimate in 2009? Let me know. I am sure you have some better ideas.

What movie did you like better - Forrest Gump or Pulp Fiction? What about Pulp Fiction or Star Wars? Star Wars or Rocky? Rocky or Schindlers' List? Toy Story or Field of Dreams?

Before you start to tell me that you can't compare the films because they're "totally different", know that deep down, you really do like one more than the other, and if forced, you could make a choice. Flickchart, a fun crowdsourced site focused on the film industry, will have you making decisions like that over and over again, helping you find and rank your favorite films of all time, and seeing how your choices compare to those of your friends, and the community at large.

Given it's a Memorial Day weekend, and movies have always been a tradition for this holiday, Flickchart is opening up in limited release to readers of this site if you use this link to get in - getting you a headstart of a few weeks to the general population.


Pick one. Which do you like better?
The premise of Flickchart is fairly simple, to start. Once you have registered, Flickchart presents you with two posters representing two films. If you have seen both films, and have a preference as to which was better, click the poster of the one you like more. If you haven't seen one, click below to say you haven't seen it, or click "Haven't seen either" to dismiss both.


Flickchart thinks it knows my favorite films.
As you choose films over one another, they start to file themselves in your all time favorites. Simply put, if you rate a movie ahead of one you had previously at #8 overall, the new film will take #8's spot, bumping it down to #9. It's survival of the fittest. This becomes especially important when you are faced with a quandary such as rating your #5 overall film against a cult classic. You may want to pick the cult classic, knowing you enjoyed it, but you will have to live with the potentially false consequence of the film living in your #4 slot for all the world to see.


Dang. Hoosiers, or Field of Dreams? I'm going with the baseball.
Flickchart lets you do more than just select from all time favorites. You can choose from one of the movie industry's many sub-genres, including Horror, Comedy and Drama to pit similar films against one another. You can even rate movies from specific decades or even a single year - helping find your personal favorites for the 1980s, or even the year 1997. (Here's mine for the 1980s and 1990s)


Global Flickchart data for The Shawshank Redemption
As you go, Flickchart remembers how many times a specific movie has "Won" in your rankings, as well as how often all Flickchart users have had that movie win. For example, Star Wars, one of the most popular movies, has been ranked nearly 2,100 times by Flickchart users, of whom 93% report having seen it, and the film wins almost 76% of all matchups.

But if I feel that Star Wars, or any other movie, is too high or too low in my list, I can go directly to that film and force Flickchart to help me rank it - going head to head with three more films in a row. (Here's that link for Star Wars and the same for American Pie)


Force ranking Titanic against three other films in Flickchart.
All the accumulated data is sorted into charts that reflect the Flickchart community's preferences - selecting "The Best Movies of All Time" down to "The Worst Movies of All Time". You can also see the community's feedback by year or decade. (See: 2009 or 1997 for years and 1990s or 1970s for decades.)


The world's best films, according to Flickchart users.
It's likely also no surprise that the site keeps tabs on users who are most active, or have gained the most popularity through friend connections, like any good social network. Some of the most active users have made thousands of movie selections.

Flickchart is more than just a Hot or Not for movies. It's a fun way to tap your brain and see if you really know just what type of films you like, and how that sets you apart from the world at large. It will have you making the hard decisions - did you like Good Will Hunting or A Few Good Men? Good Morning Vietnam or Goodfellas?

Get started with this exclusive link. Find me at: http://flickchart.com/louisgray. And should you find any bugs, remember it's a new service and they are very responsive to those I've found.