Saturday, September 4, 2010

R.I.P. Netflix Friends, 2004-10

Netflix finally pulled the plug on its social-networking initiative.
The online movie subscription service shut down the Netflix Community features on Friday. Earlier this year, Netflix announced its intent to terminate the Friends and Community section, but didn’t set a specific date.
I especially liked the top 10 lists in the section. I had some good ones of my own, including underrated horror movies, movies featuring the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, good and bad remakes of foreign movies, and the best single-season and two-season TV shows.
Sure, people created a lot of crummy lists with the feature, but some of them were gems. They included lists of movies that featured the twin towers of the World Trade Center, movies with credit sequences by Saul Bass, movies based on stories by Philip K. Dick, and movies that inspired “Star Wars.” There also were lists of movies filmed in Chicago, St. Louis, Connecticut, San Francisco, Central America and elsewhere.
All those member-created movie lists are gone now.
I’m convinced that my movie lists helped my Netflix reviewer rank. I’m currently No. 1,455 out of more than 15 million members.
I’m not the only one who misses the Netflix Friends section. Check out the responses to the news at the blog Hacking Netflix.

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