Netflix Profiles Feature Going Away
Continuing to maintain the profiles feature for the passionate few who use it (including myself) distracts us from the mission of presenting to all our members the easiest way to find the best titles for them from the 100k plus on DVD and the 10k plus available instantly.
There are already more than 1,000 comments on the post. Besides losing a useful feature, customers will lose their queues and all the rating data they’ve entered. Even if this doesn’t cost Netflix customers, it can’t be good for their recommendations engine to have multiple people rating movies under the same account/profile.
Update (2008-06-30): I just received an e-mail from Netflix:
You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.
We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.
-Your friends at Netflix
And they’ve also written a blog post. It’s still not clear to me why they thought that removing the feature would make the Web site easier for the people who didn’t use it in the first place, or why they were so willing to throw away user data.
