Netflix Launches Better Personalization Features
Netflix, the popular online DVD rental service, just announced a number of new features that will allow users to personalize their Netflix homepage to a greater extent than currently possible. Netflix users can now also create their own genres by mixing and matching different categories, and a number of new taste preference settings will allow users to fine-tune Netflix's personalized movie recommendations.
Earlier this week, Netflix also announced that its users can now syndicate their Netflix ratings to their Facebook profiles.
New Features: Taste Preferences, Personalized Homepages, Mix and Match Genres
Movie recommendations on Netflix, which are currently mostly based on your movie ratings, are one of the service's best features, and judging from what we have seen so far, the new taste preferences, which allow you to choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark, for example, will make this experience only better.
The mix and match feature, too, will allow users to create a more personalized experience on the site, which is clearly the focus of today's update.
Netflix is rolling out these new updates to its over 10 million subscribers slowly, but Todd Yellin, Neflix's Director of Product Management, expects that all members will see them on their homepages within the next week.
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I think this is great and I have been a long time subscriber to NetFlix. Your movie homepage is your movie homepage, but if you want a good site homepage I would recommend sthrt.com.
That's all well and good.
The real usability problem with the netflix system, however, occurs in the "instant" queue. Right now it mirrors the delivery queue. This FiFo (first in first out) stack works great when the computer is automatically sending you your next movie.
However, it is a terrible organizational system for instant views. What if you went into the video store and they handed you a stack of 280 movies that you had said you liked over the past year, organized in the order you picked them. Chronology is not a great organizing tool in this case, in particular considering the staggered way in which netflixs released additions to it's online catalog.
What they need to do is allow the user to set up their own libraries. Categorizing movies by genre sure, but also with user-defined types like "movies i liked in high school," "stoner-classics," and "sick day movies." Then i wouldn't need to scroll through the (oh-so-slowly-operating) browser list in full. I could go to a section of my library that meets my current needs. God, even tagging would be an improvement.
And as far as social media, sharing rankings is whatever. What they need to implement is the ability to tell people on your network, "holy crap, I just found 'The Big Sleep' on the instant viewer, I thought you would want to know." Wrap that together with remote-shared viewing so you could chat remotely through the movie with your network (MST3K-style) and you might have a service that redefines movie watching in the internet age.
But until then, I'll just have keep grabbing videos from the middle of the @#$&! stack (sending them crashing down on my head).
P.S. On the other hand, the new Silverlight viewer they implemented, is a dramatic improvement over the previous incarnation!