Become a Social Couch Potato With Followmy.tv

TV shows are refreshingly awesome. The variety and depth of content available spanning various genre is unmatchable. Given the talent and strong content behind the TV shows, even multi-million dollar movies made with bankable stars are unable to set the box office on fire. What TV watchers need is an app that can help them keep track of all the awesome shows and their schedules.

Followmy.tv keeps a record of your TV history, lets you discover new and old shows and share them with your friends. Let’s take a look at how one can become an organized couch potato with this web app.

Overview

With the help of Followmy.tv, you can connect with friends as well as strangers to share your passion of the boob tube. Thoughful social integration features will guarantee that you will discover or rediscover new and classic TV shows!

That’s not all, Followmy.tv also feeds you real time information about airdates, friend activity and more. Followmy.tv is totally free to use and easy to sign up.

User Interface

After a quick email validation, you will be taken to the dashboard. Followmy.tv is created for ease of use. The development team actually boasts that they put continuous effort into that philosophy while keeping everything as lightweight as possible. Well, we are here to test their claims aren’t we?

I’ve seen a lot of dashboards that look empty and deserted upon first launch. At times, it would be so empty there wouldn’t be any real drive to start evaluating the app by filling it up with my data. However, that’s not the case with Followmy.tv. Yes, there’s no sample data here either, but the design is brilliantly done. I was so looking forward to using the app.

It’s incredibly easy to use and with only a few clicks; you can fully customize Followmy.tv to your needs. The web app has a web 2.0 design with a perfect choice of colors and elements that go easy with the eyes. Then there are the neatly placed helpful nudges pushing you in the right direction to start using the web app.

Using Followmy.tv

Ease of Use

I chose to follow the directions of Followmy.tv and started by selecting shows that I love. If I began to choose the shows I watch and love, it might take an entire day so I am limiting myself to just a few.

I was half expecting to choose from a boring list or use the search box to find what I am looking for. To my pleasant surprise there were comprehensively compiled categories based on user ratings, popularity and pilot runs.

Click on the show of your choice to bring up a page exclusively dedicated to that series. The pages are filled with story synopsis, episode runs, next scheduled episode and more. Hit Follow to add the show to your list instantly. An overlay that collects the information regarding how many episodes you’ve watched so far is a nice touch. This should help both when you start following others and those who choose to follow you.

This elaborate collection of information in the exclusive page is pretty awesome. However, I clearly missed the ability to add multiple shows on the fly from the category view. Like most fans, I know by heart the plot and characters of the shows I love, so an AJAX enabled option to add multiple shows in one go would be much appreciated.

Social Features

Blog style comments can be found in every show’s page and you comment and/or reply to others.

On the left pane you will find all the activity associated to this page. This includes all your activity and the activities in chronological order.

To start following people who are like minded fans, head over to the Followers section. Find the ones you like and click on them to access their public profile page.

Public profile pages have a close resemblance to the show pages we have seen earlier. You can see the shows they have recently watched and comments left by others.

Do check out the Time Wasted section of the profile page without fail. It gives an interesting analysis of all the time the user has wasted so far, watching all the TV shows. It’s a killer feature for people from the media industry to gauge the interests of various sections of people.

Scheduling Shows

For a quick view of unwatched episodes of the shows you have marked that you love, head over to the dashboard. Episode names and scheduled air times will be sitting there for quick access. After watching them or gaining access to them via iTunes, Netflix etc., mark them appropriately and they will be replaced.

To access the scheduled air times of all the shows you follow, you will have to go to the Show List section.

Another laudable feature is the calender view. All episodes are displayed in their respective dates and they all are populated across the board – for all the weeks they continue to air. There are options to import the calender information to your existing Google Calender or iCal app on Mac. The developers have covered all the bases. Absolutely brilliant!

Final Thoughts

I’m such a couch potato, if there’s an award for someone who watches so many shows from so many countries, in so many languages, I am pretty sure I will be among the top few. So, I was naturally thrilled to check out the app and to my delight, Followmy.tv turned out to be a rock solid companion.

I use Glue for getting recommendations, but I found Followmy.tv offered a more streamlined and easy way to keep track of airings. Without a doubt, Followmy.tv is the best app I have discovered so far this year. Good Times!

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you like the features of Followmy.tv? Are you aware of a better app?