What Is TellmeTwin?

The Team »

Tellmetwin lets you find people with similar taste and use them to get recommendations and discover cool movies, music, books and TV.

Tellmetwin is a recommendation website for Entertainment, where users can earn Money by creating their own Content for others to discover.

Users build or claim Pages they are passionate about such as Artists or Movie pages. They earn revenues generated by sales links on these pages, a 50/50 split with Tellmetwin.

In 2009 Tellmetwin was selected the winner of the prestigious Red Herring Top 100 European Technology company award, for its unique qualitative recommendation network, "a unique qualitative recommendation network. A hybrid based on a clever combination of data mining and human interaction".

Tellmetwin has a sister website built on the same concept but exclusively meant for the discovery and recommendations of Fine Arts, www.dageek.com.

Advice from Friends, Family, or Professional Critics is useful only when their preferences closely resemble yours.

The Twin Concept

If you normally agree with the average opinion when you select your experiences in Arts or Entertainment you don't really need our services. You can for example follow what's hot, or filter your choices with average ratings on recommendation sites like IMDB or Metacritic.

If you often don't agree with the average opinion and you still want to select your experiences carefully you need tailorized recommendations.

You can get this through machine based recommendation websites that predict what you are likely to like based on different things.

Or you can use our services, which are exclusively targeted towards finding other people who have a history of thinking like you, who have similar preferences as you. And then directly ask them what you should experience.

Many people do this frequently in one way or another. They ask people they trust. Say you have 5 good friends. You will only ask one of them what movie to see because you know he resembles you somewhat in movie taste. Or say your local newspaper has 5 Art critics on payroll. You more or less know that one of them has a taste more to your liking than the others. So you try to listen to that particular critic rather than the others when it comes to selecting your next Art experience.

We are doing just that. But much more systematically and with a much larger pool than say 5 people.

The main reason we feel this is so important is the following:

People are different. Behind every creation in Art or Entertainment is a creator. An Artist. Or a group of Artists. This artist or group of artists has a set of attributes, attitudes and preferences that make them tick, move them, they think is cool or worth expressing and presenting to the world. This is what makes up the essence of their work.

Whether your own attributes, attitudes and preferences match with these particular artists is extremely hard to predict. And equally hard is to predict if you will enjoy their work.

The best way to solve this is to line up all the people who have already experienced the work of this artist, the work you are contemplating if you should go spend your time on.

Then magically accumulate all the previous preferences, loves and hates of these people.

Then compare all these to your own previous preferences, loves and hates.

Then simply rank these people from the one who has a preference history most like you to the one who is least like you.

The people at the top are the ones who come closest to agreeing with you what is moving, what is cool, what is worth expressing and presenting to the world, what is worth spending your time on.

Often it is not anything specific to put a finger on, a plot, the filming, the actors, the storyline, or a musical beat. But rather the "it" about the experience. The magic that happens when everything works out for the artist.

These people, the ones on top, are the people who on a deep level, psychologically, agree with you what is magical and what is totally lame.

While many other fine and good people have a completely different understanding of what is magic and what is lame.

It's these people, in the previous group, that we are helping you locate through our services. So you can ask them what you should experience.

How do we calculate the Recometer?

There have to be cross-ratings.
First of all, in order to produce a Recometer at all, there has to be a sufficient number of your top twins (the people closest to you in taste, usually a group of 30-50) who have rated the Item. If this is not the case the Recometer will say "Recometer not yet available".

The breakdown.

For any given Item we will compare the groups within your pool of top twins who are for it and against it.

(1) If an Item has a high percentage in both Good and Evil Recs it tells you your top twins are divided in their opinion and both groups think strongly for and against it.

This might be a reason to actually go for it, see the movie, experience the Item, since at least a good proportion of your top twins loved it.

(2) On the contrary, if the item has a low percentage in both Good and Evil Recs your top twins didn't have much of an opinion. None of them is really saying you should go for it. Chances are this thing is not going to move you, you will not be that impressed.

The Overall Recometer.

The main Recometer is calculated comparing the two groups, for and against.

In the two examples above the main Recometer could be the same. In (1) the two strong opinions even each other out, producing a low Overall Recometer. In (2) the "no opinion" simply produces a low Overall Recometer. That's why its helpful to examine what's behind.

But if an Item has a significantly higher percentage in either Good or Evil Recs it produces a high Overall Recometer either way. It is a good indicator that your top twins agree, they either love (or like) the Item or hate (or don't like) it. This is the best indicator whether you should go for it and experience the Item. If it's a high Good Recs number, check it out. If it's a high Evil Recs number chances are you won't like it.

How to get better recommendations

Rate the things where you are different. This is your strongest filter. It is valuable and rare to find the person (your twin) who shares your uniqueness which happens to be contrary to the average opinion. This person is the best candidate to warn you next time there is a blockbuster movie, or a highly awarded movie which you wont like because it has something about it, some attributes or characteristics, that the two of you hate but people in general love (and therefore: you are in great "danger" of wasting your time on). Equally, this person will be able to find that hidden movie you are likely to love but otherwise you wouldn't have heard of since people in general don't like it.

Rate the things you are passionate about. If you don't really have an opinion (your rating is 2-3 stars) you will be matched with a twin who also doesn't really have an opinion. Its just not very helpful for recommendations. You can still rate things 2 or 3 stars, just make sure to include the extremes as well in your rating.

Don't forget to rate the things you hate. You will be matched with twins who share your "hate" preferences, not just love. They can tell you which movies you should stay away from, a very important but often overlooked aspect of recommendations.

Don't forget to click on Evil Recs. These will tell you what things to stay away from. They are things your Top Twins hate and you haven't yet experienced.

What can you do with the lists? If you have rated many things on Tellmetwin you can separate them by creating lists. Just click on "Create a List to Base Results on" and create a list for example with your top 5 comedies. Then you can find twins only for these 5 movies and get recommendations based only on these twins.