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Life & fun · March 9, 2011

FO

Friends on Netflix

http://www.friendsonnetflix.com About a year ago Netflix removed their friends feature, where you could see your friends' ratings. This was a great way to discover new movies, but according to them only 2% of their userbase cared. So a few months ago I built this web app to recreate that and more. My goal was for sign-up to be as simple as possible. I don't even ask for your email (maybe I should though?). When you connect your Netflix account it pulls in your ratings/reviews. When you connect your Twitter and/or Facebook, it'll find your friend's profiles and follow them. This was my first…

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What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

http://www.friendsonnetflix.com About a year ago Netflix removed their friends feature, where you could see your friends' ratings. This was a great way to discover new movies, but according to them only 2% of their userbase cared. So a few months ago I built this web app to recreate that and more. My goal was for sign-up to be as simple as possible. I don't even ask for your email (maybe I should though?). When you connect your Netflix account it pulls in your ratings/reviews. When you connect your Twitter and/or Facebook, it'll find your friend's profiles and follow them. This was my first attempt at creating something in Python on Google App Engine. Having to denormalize everything was a challenge, but it seems to be working and the Task Queue came in handy. Supposedly it will now scale to millions of users. Good ol' premature optimization. The Netflix API is kind of a pain, in that they don't provide a direct way to get all your ratings. For the initial import, I have to check every title you've ever rented/watched/queued to see if it has a rating. There also isn't any date information associated with your old ratings :( I hope to find better ways to encourage people to share the site with friends. So far hardly anyone follows anyone, merely using it as a backup. This site is a lot more interesting with friends. I even have browser extensions that show your friend's ratings within Netflix.com Any suggestions/feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

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