Christina Dulude

Netflix now has RSS feeds! I noticed this last week sometime, and was curious when this feature first appeared. Cursory Google research revealed that the feeds made their debut sometime around September 12, to the best of my knowledge.

Netflix has “personalized” feeds for a user’s queue, recent rental activity and recommendations. They also offer generic feeds for new releases and the current top 100 films, as well as feeds for the top 25 films of various genres.

Personally, I find the “new releases” feed to be the most useful, followed by the “top 100″ list. And maybe any of the “top 25″ lists for people who are interested in a specific genre. Users are probably not inclined to go to the website regularly just to see what movies were recently released. But at the same time, receiving regular email announcements of new films could get annoying after a while.

Enter… the RSS feed.

It sits quietly in your news aggregator, but the moment Netflix announces new releases – taa daa! You’re alerted. And it doesn’t clog up your email inbox.

I’m a little less impressed with the personalized queue feed. For one thing, the titles appear out of order in my aggregator, so I have to go searching to find my next movie.

But more importantly, the queue RSS just seems a little pointless. When Netflix ships a DVD to you, you receive an email anyway. So immediacy and information “push” technology is already in place. An RSS feed duplicates this effort, and not as effectively.

To its credit, however, the queue RSS lists summaries of all upcoming movies, which the alert emails do not; and this can be useful. And of course, the queue RSS shows all the films in your queue, not just the one being sent.

Nevertheless, your queue is reordered only when you change it. So it just seems a little odd to log onto the Netflix site and reorder your queue, and shortly thereafter have your news aggregator tell you, “Guess what! Your queue has changed!”

It might be interesting to subscribe to other people’s queue RSS feeds, however, just to see what they have on their lists. This actually sounds rather pathetic, on second thought. So never mind.

Incidentally, I wonder if Netflix’s offering RSS feeds has anything to do with this guy. Last month, he programmed a feed of his Netflix queue just for fun, and made big news in geek blogs everywhere.

I have a few Gmail invites, just like everyone else. So if anyone wants one, let me know. Or I could sell them on eBay, like some people are doing. Which sort of cracks me up.

I’ve been using Gmail for the last couple months, just to try it out. I like how you can search for messages in your account; that’s handy. The filtering functionality seems pretty good too. And the 1GB storage space is not too shabby either.

My boss is a little iffy about the ad placement — how the content of emails is parsed for keywords, and (theoretically) relevant advertisements appear on the side. She doesn’t like the idea of her mail being read by anyone, even if it’s a machine.

Personally, I think the message parsing ad placement is really clever from a programming point of view.

It reminds me of the Opera web browser, actually. I used that as my default browser a few years back. Opera gave you the option of either buying the browser, or downloading a free version (this still might be the policy; I haven’t used it in a couple of years).

But anyway, the free version had banner ads built in. However, you could customize your banner ads, based on your demographic, and this was great fun. Like: “Let’s see what sort of ads I get if I say I’m a….. teenage boy in Alabama!” or: “Today I’ll be a…. 90 year old woman whose major hobbies include motorcycling and football!”

My favorite personas were: “Late 20s male working in the tech sector” (which elicited ads for nifty gadgets); and “man in 50s earning over $150K” (ads for fancy sports cars and expensive gadgets). My most unfavorite demographic was my true one — its ads were generally centered around clothes, beauty products, and the like. Ick.

So it’s been a (minor) thrill to see what sort of ads I get in Gmail, depending on my message content. Usually, they’re pretty accurate. But I’m tempted to start sending convoluted emails to myself, just to see what the Gmail ad parser does with it.

Update: I just found out about iSnoop’s Gmail invite spooler. People who have extra invites can deposit them there, and non-invited people who want accounts can get them! Pretty nifty.