I recently became re-acquainted with
Netflix - the online DVD rental company. From my previous encounter, I knew about
the Ratings and Recommendations and how powerful that could be in predicting your tastes, but now it seems that they
have taken a sip from the Social Software kool-aid - a whole set of community features they call Friends.I'm not sure how recent these changes are but I did get the chance to play with them today as I connected to a friend. I came away impressed, and wondering when we'll start to see such integration in other websites (Yahoo! - I'm looking at you, you've pushed out Ratings and Recommendations broadly over your properties, but haven't tied them together well yet).
Clearly Netflix understands both their audience (we subscribers) and their content (the DVDs) - the Friends page makes the love of movies front and center. The obvious features are the views of your Friends Queues, and movies they've recently rated, but there is much more...
On your Friends page, you can see what movies you rated similarly - both high and low, and this is also presented in a fun little 'Friends Quiz' such as - 'Which one of these did <friend> like?'. On the movies page, anything that links you to your friends adds a purple figure on the bottom right that indicates that someone on your list has done something to that item before. You can push a Suggestion to them and even write a mini-review (called a '2-Cent Review') that's for their eyes only.
All in all, I'm very impressed and will definitely be spending more time exploring Netflix now I have a friend to help guide me.
1. This is one of the many useless features of Netflix. I prefer GreenCine's message boards for better feedback on DVDs. Netflix should work on the basics like rentals that actually play.
Posted at 7:43AM on Feb 3rd 2006 by manuel