Finding movie times can be an annoying task. I remember the “old” days when you would have to scan through a newspaper (yeah those things made of paper) to not only find the movie you want to see, but also find the movie theater. Well, even though it’s now 2008, we’re still stuck on this format it seems! The key to a successful iGoogle Gadget is efficient use of screen real estate, information at a glance that’s condensed and scannable. There lies the problem with this gadget.
What you see in the initial window is the top 3 theater hits with some info (see screenshots). Similar info is displayed for DVDs, and movies coming soon. While it is nice to know that a ridiculous amount of teenage girls went to see Twilight and that Miley Cyrus had some role in Bolt, I wanted to know the show times to see Transporter 3. Of course since this didn’t make the top 3 movies I had no way of seeing even the least bit of information in a minimized format. So I expanded the gadget in hopes of seeing some sort of innovative system for seeing movie times.
To my dismay, I was greeted by the same old newspaper style that I had grown to hate. I had high hopes for the filtering option too. However, all I found was a huge list of movies I had never heard of. But than again it did make me look up the movie The Carrot Cake Confessions. After doing all this I finally was able to get somewhat of a more efficient means for finding the times to my movie. But this is far from the efficient experience that I have come to know and love from my iGoogle page. This Flixster Gadget may provide a lot of information, but its inefficiency makes you want to have the Flixster website bookmarked instead. While this gadget appears to have a large fan base from people who use it on Facebook and Myspace, I will not be cluttering my iGoogle page with it.
