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Show HN: Friends on Netflix

8 points by dsims ↗ HN
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!

6 comments

[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] thread
aditya
Brilliant. Just signed up and told my friends on FB about it too. A few suggestions:

* Make it easy, Step 1: Connect netflix, Step 2: Connect Twitter/FB, and so on.

* You're telling me something I already know on my home screen, maybe show me highly rated movies from within the FoN network (not necessarily my friends) without telling me who rated them, etc?

* You can grab email using FB connect, and it is a great marketing tool once you get going to bring people back to the website.

Super excited!

dsims
Thanks! I designed it so that the site can be used even if you don't have a Netflix account, but maybe that's a very small use case I can drop.

Ideally the page would be full of your friend's ratings, but yeah, I should fill that empty space with something if that's not the case.

[deleted]
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rome
Great! I joined as well. Into_Now has a feature where you can choose to post what you're watching to Facebook. This might be a good feature for you site and help connect people. Good luck!
staunch
You may want to consider changing the name, so you don't have to do it later if Netflix's legal department contacts you.

http://developer.netflix.com/page/Api_terms_of_use

Section 3.5

"In using the Netflix Brands pursuant to Section 3.3, you may not do the following

...

use a Netflix Brand as the largest or most prominent brand in your Application or as the most prominent element of your Application or as part of the name of your Application;"

dsims
They also say "Netflix cannot be the first word in the application name. It can be used in the naming of an app as “x for Netflix” or “x with Netflix”, “x’s Netflix Manager”, etc." http://developer.netflix.com/docs/Branding

In their approved App Gallery are apps with names like "My Netflix" and "Search for Netflix"