The Bee Hive

Yes, they screwed up by announcing they would take away the Profiles feature. But then, when it became clear that customers were upset with the announcement — and by upset, I mean ready to cancel their accounts — Netflix retracted their decision, and sent one of the best apology emails I’ve seen.

We Are Keeping Netflix Profiles

Dear Kate,

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

Short and sweet, and to the point. “You spoke, and we listened.” That’s the essence of managing customer experience, even when it happens a little after it could have. Well done, Netflix.

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Oddly enough, a Google news alert for “kate o’neill” brought me to this topic in the bisexual community over at LiveJournal. Turns out no one was talking about me — the “kate” came from “Kate Winslet” and the “o’neill” from “Chris O’Neill” — but in a way, they kind of were, in a strange coincidence.

The discussion was around the list of movies in the Bisexual category at Netflix, and whether the titles constituted a good set, or were just stereotypes. Some commenters had already made the case that they were, for the most part, a good set, which I appreciated… since I’m the one who put the list together.

I left the following comment:

I’m the person who initially put together the list of bisexual movies for Netflix. I was the content manager there in 2000-2001, and I created the Bisexual subgenre within the content database, gradually populating it over time with titles that I (as a bisexual person) recognized as pertaining in some way to bisexuality, because they either feature an openly bi character, have some fluidity of sexuality within the story, are mentioned in Wayne Bryant’s wonderful book “Bisexual Characters in Film,” or seemed relevant in some other way.

I certainly understand if they seem random; I thought it would be preferable to have a broader category than one that missed the breadth of representation of bisexuality, for better or worse.

The internet is such a small world.

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Check it out:

“The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas[…]. It turns out that […] it’s straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)[…] in the process possibly working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details”

Oh no! Someone’s going to figure out I’m a bleeding heart bisexual liberal/progressive.

I suppose I should consider this a privacy violation of some sort, since I’m almost certainly represented in the data set, but whatever.

For that matter, my ratings data may very well have been one very useful data set in helping the computer scientists crack the anonymizing code.

Whoops. Sorry I’m such a movie geek.

In honor of my likely indirect contribution to this situation, I offer my first-ever LOLcat.

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