RSS For The TV Junkie: Orangutag

If you read my review of LocateTV, then you already know I am a TV junkie. That means when I see an application come across my radar that offers me a better way to track and watch television, I'm all over it. This week someone pointed me to Orangutag, an RSS based television tracker.

Orangutag, much like LocateTV, is a simple application that does a few things well. In fact, the only way I could think of to make either LocateTV or Orangutag better would be to combine their features and get the best of both worlds - an RSS feed of your favorite shows, new episode alerts and a list of where they are playing. That would be perfect.

Orangutag has been around for a little over a year in test mode. Their beta is now accepting email signups, and their process is quick and painless. Once you receive your confirmation email, it's a simple matter to activate your account and set up your profile. The profile page they offer is quite basic, which is fine with me in this age of social networking. There are plenty of comprehensive profiles about me already out there.

After I uploaded my avatar file and filled in a few blanks with some personal information for other Orangutaggers to see, I was ready to try out the application. I headed over to “Manage My Watch list” and started adding shows to my television feed. Orangutag has gone out of their way to make this as simple and pain free as possible. You simply type in your show name, see a list of colorful buttons, and drag it over to the watch list and drop it in. There is no limit to the size of your watch list.

Once you have your watch list set up, you can add it to your regular RSS feed reader, allowing you to get up to the minute information on all of your favorite programs. Every time a new episode is coming one, you'll get a note in your watch feed. It's fantastic. It's already saved my bacon on a couple of new shows I wanted to remember to DVR - I entered them into my watch list and voila! an episode reminder appeared before they aired.

Just like any RSS application, keeping your RSS feed up to date is as simple as going back to Orangutag and adding or removing shows from your list. Doing so automatically updates your feed reader results. As you drag and drop shows into your watch list, they also appear on your navigation menu, and in the front page tag cloud. I'm not normally a fan of the tag cloud as a way of navigation, but in this case it is a nice way to see what other people are watching, After all, if my DVR isn't full, I'm not happy.

Once a show is in your navigation bar, clicking on the name of the show takes you to that show's page on Orangutag. You can then give the show tag words relevant to you, find episodes, see who else on Orangutag watches the show, write a review of the show, or add it to your del.icio.us links. The reviews are often funny, though not every show receives one. My favorite part of the show page was being able to see who the other TV junkies were.

Clicking on the avatar of your fellow show watchers takes you to their simple profile page we talked about earlier. You can see who they are, where they are from and what they watch. You can add comments to their profile page, and click on the avatars of people who either are their friends, or who watch similar shows - they show up as two separate lists.

As you browse the site, you notice you can declare an individual episode of a show as watched or not. Once you click is as watched, it generates a note on your profile that you have seen it, and a new feed of episodes you have recently watched that other people can subscribe to. i fact, if you want to crowd your feed reader with nothing but television, you can subscribe to the watch list feed, the recently watched episodes feed or subscribe to a person's blog.

That's right, this also acts as a blog aggregator for users. You can add a blog and a Feedburner feed, and an excerpt will appear on your profile with a link to the Feedburner feed for people to subscribe to you. It's a nice way to drive traffic to your site, especially if you happen to blog about television. I can see this becoming a great source of traffic for fellow television junkies.

Overall this site gets high marks from me for being something I can really use. It's easy, it's fun, and it has just the right amount of “social” without becoming overwhelming. The color scheme leaves a bit to be desired (diaper brown and teal), but the ease of use and fun aspect easily over ride that drawback. I have already placed this site on my daily use bookmarks, and have my laptop ready for a fun evening session of writing in the recliner while I watch my favorite shows with fellow Oragutaggers.

(The photo below is a live screen shot from my feed reader of Orangutag in action.)