Originally Posted by Den of Geek

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to make a list of each film I watched. This way, I’ll know exactly how many films I’ll have ended up watching in 2012, and know whether it would be anywhere near my target of 365. Despite being a film fan for as long as I can remember, I have never logged how many films I watch in any given year, so thought it would be an interesting exercise.

In order to keep track, I toyed with a few ideas: keeping a spreadsheet and a weekly blog recapping what I watched were two. But a far more elegant solution soon presented itself, as not too far into the new year I received an invite to Letterboxd – a social networking site for film lovers.

I was initially a little sceptical, as I’ve tried using Hulu, IMDb and Get Glue for similar purposes, and I didn’t really take to any of them. But within minutes of using Letterboxd, I was hooked. The design and interface are intuitive and user friendly. Once you’ve secured and accepted your invite, getting started couldn’t be simpler.

After completing my profile by listing my favourite movies (a task that takes minutes), I was up and running and ready to start logging the films. One of the joys of the site in this regard is how flexible it is. You can simply log the title and leave it at that, or you can add a star rating, date when you viewed it, tag it with key words, like the title, or add a review. From what I’ve seen, there’s some diversity on how users take advantage of the site’s functionality.

Some will review everything they watch, others simply list and rate the titles they watch (which is what I do for the most part), and some seem to be on a mission to log every film in their collection or that they’ve seen. The watchlist is a great feature, as adding titles is incredibly easy, so once set up, there’s no excuse for forgetting to watch films that have been recommended to you.

(snip)

Another useful function is the ability to find your Twitter friends on the site by entering your username and password. Doing this early on will give you a starting point in terms of people to follow. Checking this periodically is also useful as more people are getting invites all the time.

There are numerous other great touches, such as being able to add titles to your Netflix queue, and later updates will enable you to import your Netflix ratings and viewing history to the site – something similar will also be available for IMDb ratings. With Letterboxd currently being in closed beta, improvements to the site are planned, as are additional services, such as an iPhone and Android app.

(snip)