New Social Media Network – DigitalPal

Dutch-based IT company DigitalPal, a new social media network aimed to gather and connect people around media – namely, movies, music, books, and video games, launched in beta on January 16, 2012. DigitalPal allows users to discuss their favorite movies, music, books and games with pals who share their tastes.

You may store and share movies you want to see, playlists of music you want to hear, books you want to read, and games you want to play in real time. You may rate pals’ and your favorites, give and receive personal recommendations, add to your wishlist. With Catalog feature, users can make their collections public and help a pal in search for a particular movie, book or game or just use it for their own filing system.

When you sign in for the first time, the site takes you to MoviePal, one of the four services. The other services are MusicPal, BookPal and GamePal.

You are asked to rate your 10 favorite movies on a scale of one to 10. You can either rate movies that are among the most popular movies or you can search for a movie you want to rate. You may also leave a movie for later. Movies you rate will be used to calculate recommendations for your taste.

While rating, you may read more about the movie, or even watch a trailer.

I saw the trailer for Schindler’s List. But for The Godfather, I got the message – ‘This movie is private’. And for The Silence of the Lambs, I got the message – ‘Embedding disabled by request, Watch on YouTube’.

After rating 10 movies, you are taken to Recommendations page with more movies, and are asked to refine the selection process so MoviePal may recommend more movies to you.

You may skip a movie, add to wishlist, catalog, find similar or recommend to your pals. You may even add a comment or watch trailer till you have found a movie to recommend to your pals.

Once you have selected a movie to recommend, you will be shown a My Pals box to check out one or more pals. You may also edit a pre-filled message for your pals’ timeline.

Your pal will see a status update via DigitalPal on his timeline about the movie that you have recommended to him.

The service features a board for users to display all of their wishlisted and rated movies stored. You may also add a comment and discuss with pals, or remove a movie from your wishlist. Having them all in one place makes it easy to recommend them to pals. Connect with your pals and start sharing your experiences.

There are three more features – Rated, Wishlist, and Catalog where you organize your rated, wishlisted and cataloged movies respectively.

Organize your past experience, rate movies and show your pals what you like and dislike.

Add movies you wish to see to your wishlist. Have them all in one place and use it as a time saver when deciding what to watch.

The same way you may share your experience for music, books and games. On MusicPal, tracks from all artists are always sorted by popularity which also helps in exploring new music.

On the left sidebar you will find below the feature tabs explained above, two boxes – My Pals and My Pals Favorites. My Pals box lists all your Facebook friends whom you may invite to use DigitalPal. My Pals Favorites box is dynamic and lists all of your pals’ latest favorite movies, music, books and games.

DigitalPal is currently in beta version and open for testing. So check it out and give them your valued feedback. You may also write your comments on our blog post and tell us what you think.