Monday, 05/02/05

Netflix's "Friends" feature recently saw a quiet upgrade, allowing your reciprocal friends to see your whole queue, and highlighting recent additions and ratings. Because you still can't view your own account's Friends page (a feature that existed in testing but was pulled before launch), people on your list have better insight into your recent activity than you do.

There's also a nifty consolidated view of all of your friends' ratings, optionally constrained to recent decisions, or to particular star ratings.

I like the changes, but they seem likely to constrict the range of people with whom making Friends is appropriate. Netflix upped the ante on Kellan's early prediction of "an increasing disconnect between what people rate high, and what they watch", which he made when your Friends were only aware of movies you'd explicitly rated. Now, if you go on a Baywatch binge, there's no hiding it from your compañeros.

I went through my queue looking for anything I'd be ashamed to disclose, scrubbing the Attack of the Clones bonus disc and a couple of movies I'd already seen. So, now that I'm ideologically correct, if you've got a Netflix account and we've ever discussed a movie, I believe I'm man enough to put you on my now-more-invasive-than-ever friends list. Send me a note.

(Update: I made that Baywatch reference before doublechecking, and it appears Netflix only stocks one Baywatch production, a movie made years after the show ended. How peculiar that the series isn't on DVD. It was number one in the world for a few years -- not that I saw any of it, of course, at least after Erika Eleniak left.) 09:44AM «

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