Power Hacker Kent Brewster Leaves Yahoo for Netflix

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 19, 2009 5:56 AM / 9 Comments

Business troubles at Yahoo! haven't changed the fact that the company has some of the most innovative Open Web advocates in the industry in its ranks, but today one of those innovative people has left. API wizard Kent Brewster told us last night that he's joining Netflix as the company's newest API developer and evangelist. He'll start there at the top of next month.

Brewster's title at Yahoo! was Technology Evangelist and Front-End Engineer, a position he took almost 5 years ago after an amazing 18 years at WebMD and its predecessors. Job changes like this are what we cover on our Jobwire site.

We met Brewster when he announced his fabulous BlogJuice widget. That bit of code queries Yahoo's MyBlogLog API with the click of a button and displays LinkedIn, Delicious, Flickr and other data about the most recent MyBlogLog users who have visited any participating blog. Brewster has lots of other dazzling lightweight projects up on his personal blog as well.

Netflix has one of the most exciting APIs on the web, including two way read/write access, password-free OAuth user authentication for third party applications and a huge base of users. (Disclosure: That API is powered by RWW sponsor Mashery, though the sponsorship relationship began well after we reviewed the Netflix API.)

The company has a strong commitment to developers; nothing being better evidence than the $1 million Netflix Prize for any shop that can build a substantially better recommendation engine than what the company already has.

As fans of cutting-edge developer innovation, we're very excited to see what Kent Brewster can do in his new position.

Photo CC by Yodel Anecdotal.

Comments

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Kent is awesome; I can't wait to see how I'll be able to use Netflix integrated into all sorts of sites and devices once he gets his hands on their API!

Back in October, we shot some video with Michael Hart from Netflix right after their API initially launched. http://www.thesocialweb.tv/blog/2008/10/episode-12-netf.html

Posted by: davidrecordon.com | March 19, 2009 10:23 AM

This is a great hire for Netflix; Kent is so talented-and of course a loss for Yahoo!, but perhaps he had done all he could do there.

Posted by: Susan Mernit | March 19, 2009 1:53 PM

Kent is an absolute steal for Netflix. Awesomely talented and a wonderful guy.

Posted by: Eric | March 19, 2009 2:06 PM

Kent was in the audience for Ben Metcalfe's Core Conversation at SxSW. Kent's comments stood out and he highlighted where projects such as stackoverflow.com will be critical to the commenting and promotion landscape of the coming masses that reach to web interfaces.

Learning that Kent is heading over to Netflix makes me want to reconsider renewing my dormant Netflix account just to see what he'll be up to over there.

Posted by: Jay Cuthrell | March 19, 2009 2:32 PM

Kent was in the audience for Ben Metcalfe's Core Conversation at SxSW. Kent's comments stood out and he highlighted where projects such as stackoverflow.com will be critical to the commenting and promotion landscape of the coming masses that reach to web interfaces.

Learning that Kent is heading over to Netflix makes me want to reconsider renewing my dormant Netflix account just to see what he'll be up to over there.

Posted by: qthrul | March 19, 2009 2:34 PM

Brewster is awesome! Can't wait to see all the cool things he whips up at Netflix!

Posted by: Allen | March 19, 2009 2:51 PM

It's nice to see a big fish move to a suitable sized body of water. Congratulations, Kent.

Posted by: Jeffery | March 19, 2009 3:14 PM

Do what Kent Brewster does and start earning money online now!

http://www.ehow.com/how_4859939_earn-extra-money-early-today.html

Posted by: Stacy | March 26, 2009 11:52 AM