So it’s two days before the season debut of Mad Men and you’re craving your Don Draper fix. Did you know AMC just made last year’s season finale available for free on the web? You would if you were connected to Jim Lanzone on Clicker. The former Ask.com CEO debuted his online TV guide’s newest set of features for the first time publicly at Coins2Day Brainstorm Tech in Aspen.
With Clicker Social, Lanzone aims to capture the holy grail of the social web: discovery. Since its launch last November, he has focused on building and organizing a library of 650,000 movies and TV shows. Now users will be able to log in with their Facebook IDs to create profiles and designate shows they like. They’ll see an activity stream capturing what’s happening in their networks. And, not dissimilar from other services catapulting to pop culture fame at the moment, users can check-in when watching shows on other sites and earn badges and other awards for their behaviors. It’s like Entertainment Weekly—with your friends as the real-time editors.
Along with that, Lanzone is rolling out Clicker Mobile. The Clicker service is now available with all its social components on Android and soon Apple devices. One particularly cool feature: with the click of a button, users can sort their playlist according to what programs are actually able to play on the device. (With its Flash capabilities, Android offers a lot more options than Apple at the moment.)
As sites like Pandora, which have deep social integrations have demonstrated, social features have the ability to attract and engage users at rapid speeds. By embracing capabilities just as the social web is emerging, Clicker could gain great advantage. But with so many web services chasing social discovery, competition will be tough.
