Social Media Highlights: Letterboxd

When you think of a social networking site, you might think of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Perhaps you think of earlier incarnations of the websites that digitally connect us, such as Myspace or Friendster. But as the social web has developed and connected so many of us to each other, many social networking sites beyond the most popular and generalist ones have popped up, including ones centered around a common interest -- such as watching movies.

Letterboxd (letterboxd.com) is a social networking sites for movie aficionados. The free membership allows you to track, rate, and review movies you have seen, make lists of movies for yourself or other people to browse, follow other people for their reviews and activity, 'like' lists and reviews, and keep a diary of your film-watching. Upgrading to a pro membership (currently $19 USD per year) most notably allows you to have no third-party ads and access to additional statistics about your film watching and site activity, as well as filtering films by what streaming services they are on and getting notified when films you want to watch become available on said streaming services. Additionally, some minor but useful actions also become available to you such as pinning reviews on your account, filtering your activity feed by type of post, duplicating lists, and changing your username, which are nice extras. There is one additional account level type, the patron account ($49 USD per year); this allows you primarily to visibly support the website via your name's inclusion on the patron website, some fun cosmetic upgrades such as being able to add a background to your account, and early access to beta features on the site. While this final account type would likely mostly appeal to power users and does not offer the practical upgrade of features that the pro account upgrade does, the perks do offer a fun way to support the site and flex on your fellow movie buffs a little bit.

It should be said that I am not truly a movie buff in the way that most of Letterboxd's users seem to be. However, even as a casual movie fan, this website offers interesting content. While browsing the site for this review, I found myself very drawn to the user-created Lists section. These lists seem to run the gamut from informative to humorous to extremely niche and back again. As a sample, the top three lists on the highlighted display of lists that are "Popular this week" are:

• Guide to Film Movements (History of Art Cinema)
• All films Scorsese mentions in his "Il Maestro" essay
• Movies Jared Leto should be nominated for

The last one is an empty list and at time of this posting, has garnered over 2700 likes and 100 comments, dwarfing the responses to the other two lists for the week.

One other thing that I found both notable and delightful about Letterboxd is that you do not actually have to have an account to browse the content users have posted. So if you are not a huge movie buff but your brother-in-law keeps raving about how good a certain flick is, or if you are a public librarian suddenly finding themselves needing to bolster your library's collection of horror films when your tastes tend more towards the Rom-Com section, Letterboxd would allow you to browse reviews for specific titles and see how fans of a genre categorize and review both the titles you have heard of and the ones you know nothing about. Tech-savvy movie buff patrons might also appreciate the website suggestion for tracking their personal watch lists and finding new films as well. Overall, I think that Letterboxd is a neat site that integrates useful social networking site features into a site that can bring film fans together.