Say hi to Hello Movies, another product built from The Movie Genome Project (TMGP). Since it just came out of beta, it's really more of a wiggly fingered Miss America wave rather than a big howdy, but like every beta phase, the opportunity exists for quick improvements.

Unlike fellow TMGP product Jinni.com, it doesn't require you to rate movies or take a test to determine your favorite movie types. You can simply visit the site, choose the genre of movie you'd like to watch, whether to watch it for free or to pay, and HM will find it for you to watch online. Theoretically, that is.

In practice, you can choose whether you'd like to watch movies on sites in the categories: Online Free (Hulu, YouTube, Crackle), Online Paid (iTunes, Amazon Video, Criterion Online), Netflix, Netflix Instant Watch, Xbox Live Marketplace, Comcast OnDemand, Starz OnDemand, and Encore OnDemand. You choose a genre of film. Hello Movies spits out a very short list of results that's far from complete and doesn't even list all of the results on the sites it claims to index. (A separate search on Hulu turned up a number of missing results, although the site did provide all three of Crackle's results.)

For instance, choosing "Free Movies" and "horror" should net you a few pages of choices, but in reality it brings up one page with 24 results. HM specifically says it includes Hulu, Crackle, and YouTube in its free results, but it didn't list all of the horror genre results of those sites. Plus, it ignores other legal sites like FearNet.com and Fancast which could increase the number of viewer choices. Perhaps it's a misbegotten notion to try to get you to pay for movies, or maybe it's just bad programming. Either way, it significantly reduces the utility of the site.

It doesn't work much better if you're willing to pay to watch something online. Rather than bringing up pages of results one can click and watch, it brings up pages of results one could either install iTunes in order to pay to watch, or one could purchase on DVD online, then wait days for its arrival. There's still no instant gratification there, which is supposed to be the whole point of the site, as it advertises itself.

It would be handy to have one site that let you find and watch any movie online. You'd never have to physically visit all the other sites; you'd save time, wasted effort, and frustration. Hello Movies doesn't let you watch on its site though. It merely links you to the movie off site. There's no viewer, embedded content, etc. That's frustrating because many of the sites linked to don't load quickly and feature poor interfaces.

Of course, Hello Movies could become extremely handy. All that needs to happen is the developers index the full catalog of an increased number of sites. They've already got an amazing light interface that loads like a dream. The site represents every movie with a small movie poster icon and text title and doesn't bog things down with unnecessary Flash presentations. Even on a barely there 1.0 Mbps WiFi connection there was no wait. Throw an on site viewer in, and they'd have a near perfect site.

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This post blogged by Carlie Lawson. She is a hazards consultant, freelance writer, and weather nerd living in Norman, OK, also known as the weather capital of the United States.