Well how this situation would work, in the optimal-case would be something like:

While watching those 26 episodes, you managed to make small comments/expressions in near real-time. After episodes you may have made a reflection or blogged about the episode. These things serve the retrospect. Now we need the list.

You add the title to your subjectivity/favorites list, which is composed of not just 5, but however many titles one wishes. Now what happens is that one doesn’t intently make the top 5, the items simply are compared to one another and justly ordered. The lists are meant to be pliable, so shifting items around from various levels is fine.

So 26/50, the state of the experience, whether finished or not, plays into it, but the thing to remember is that a complete experience and a current/paused experience are both states. One viewing the list should be able to see this state, but the progress should be viewed in the expressions.

On melative, one can view a user’s stream updates/reflections for a media or single-title without much hassle of searching or naming conventions. (announce/action/stream update/reflection are all capable of being directed onto a media-title). Like my reflections or stream announcements on Toradora! So given this questionable, not fully completed title on a user’s top 5 might need some form of justification to make sense, and that is the purpose of these updates.

In this way, users can view a top 5 list as well as the interaction/expression the owner had while experiencing given titles, or in general retrospect.

The site just enables this logging of expression directly on titles for later reference or meaning to the owner or other users. Top 5 is a good example in where this log allows understanding to the journey behind a given list.

An even greater advantage occurs when mixing friends, since melative currently allows viewing updates on a given media/title/character/creator within just the pool of friends (or those one follows). (this is also allowed in the stream for #tags and !groups)

Note: it is more about style of interaction. melative doesn’t try to replace sites like MAL. We are trying to explore various ways of interacting and relating media-title items, making orderly sense of them, as well as provide an open interface for reference and other applications to build on.

This style of interaction can probably be accomplished with a combination of MAL/AniDB, twitter, and blogs, but there is no tie together, and twitter is plain disorganized for episodic logging from the perspective of anyone other than the one doing the updates. Blog posts play into melative in various ways. If one wishes they can post an article link right onto a title or make an association (bookmark) in which the event pours into the stream notifying friends.

melative is just a different meta-social approach to media interaction and ratings.

Coincidentally, melative caters to the more comprehensive branding via expression in the stream. One may notice that the application does not care about how many episodes of series Q a user has seen, it is arbitrary and useless.

Do say more. I’ve had immense trouble with putting Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam in my MAL 5, because even though I’ve seen the movie compilations I’ve only seen 26 of 50 episodes of the TV series. Also, I don’t rate shows in MAL until I’ve completed them but I’ve seen others do so.

What are your thoughts on this matter?