Powered by Twitter Tools.
A while ago, I did some data mining on my Netflix rental statistics. I tried to make those tools open so other people could study their own. I’m sad to say that those tools no longer work (Netflix changed what data was available and the format,) but I’m happy to say someone else has picked up the slack and made much neater tools.
Netflix provides RSS feeds for users to view their queues, recommendations, reviews, etc. Feedflix (feedflix.com) is a free service that mines those RSS feeds (you sign up with your private feed code,) to show you more information about how you use Netflix. It goes a step further to aggregate everyone’s queues and at-home movies to show data that Netflix doesn’t publish. (For example, National Treasure : Book of Secrets is currently at the homes of 55 Feedflix subscribers, is queued by 376 of them, and has been reviewed 8 times.)
Some of the data you can see without submitting your Netflix data. For example, I am in the 10% of surveyed users whose queue size is between 400 and 499. Almost 75% of the surveyed users return their movies in 9 days or less. Yet another way I feel like an outlier (at least I have nice hair.)
If you use Netflix, add in your RSS feeds so we can get a larger aggregate picture of Netflix users. (You’ll also appreciate knowing that you’ve had the 24 DVD for 46 days and each rental has cost you $12 a movie.) The site is maturing, and I’ve talked with the developer. He’s always looking for more data and more suggestions on how to manipulate it. If you liked my day of week calculations or cost calculations, those are in Feedflix now, so be sure to check it out.
I’m really impressed with the Feedflix data and how its improved my Netflix user experience. My only existing criticism is the lack of sample size anytime a percentage is mentioned. (For example, 23% of Feedflix subscribers return movies within 3-4 days… but 23% of what? 100 users? 10,000? A million?)
I decided to upgrade to Firefox 3 beta on the tablet, in part because I was looking for more memory performance improvements and also because I’m about to reinstall the laptop anyway.
Things are mostly the same. I haven’t had any crashes yet. It add some new internal functionality that’s pretty cool. By default, it asks you if you want to keep the tabs/open pages when you close a window. There have been plugins for this in the past, but it’s nice to see it in the core. (And having the option of deciding to keep them, or discarding them. You can specify to always do one or the other.)
It also has a nice feature where it remembers if you’ve resized text sizes on sites regardless of tab or window. This means that if I bump up the size in a Wikipedia page (so I can read it comfortably from the couch — ctrl-0, ctrl-dash and ctrl-equals are my friends,) and I open a link to something else in Wikipedia in another tab, it uses the sizing from the previous tab. Nice touch.
If a page prompts you for a password, it asks if you want to remember/not-remember/ignore in a bar at the top of the page instead of in a pop-up. That nice because it loads the next page without waiting for you to answer about the password. It’s easier to ignore if you don’t want to use the password management features.
On the downside, many of my plugins are not FF3 compatible and I find myself really missing mouse gestures and a few other things I’ve just incorporated into my daily browsing. I’m also really annoyed to discover it still searches for plugin updates on startup, and fails to start the browser until you acknowledge pending updates. I wish it would check for updates after loading…. I hate starting the browser and not actually having it start (and then hunting through the open windows for the dialog box just because WeatherFox or DownThemAll has a new update.) If I start a browser, I want a browser.
All for now.
Edited, for Marc.
Aboutwww.flickr.com
|
