Better Living Through Introspection

For those of you who only check for new articles and might have missed yesterday’s update, it appears that the Interwebs have proven themselves useful for once:

Update (June 30, 2008): Success! I just received an email 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

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Update: A Certain Someone pointed out to us that for the petition and phone adverse, Consumerist’s post on the Netflix Profile debacle has step-by-step instructions for complaining to Netflix via their online customer support.
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For me, one of the best features of online DVD rental service Netflix has been the Netflix Profile. In short, the Netflix Profile allows you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account. This has been an invaluable feature for me and A Certain Someone — it has allowed us to keep my movies, favorites, ratings, and queues separate from each others, so that we can maintain our own movie-watching preferences — kind of like maintaining your own identity in a committed relationship. It’s such a valuable feature for us we’ve been astounded when mentioning it to other couples and discovering they had no idea this feature was even available — though, granted, Netflix never made it an easy feature to find in the first place.

Which brings me to an email I received this morning from Netflix:

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

Must. Choke. Back. Rage.

According to SaveNetflixProfiles, “when contacted by phone, [Netflix] responded that ‘most users do not use this feature.’”

WTF? That’s a solution? How about “Oh, no one is using this feature, why don’t we MAKE IT EASY TO DISCOVER INSTEAD OF GETING RID OF IT.”

All I want to know is: what kind of world do Netflix employees live in where they think that this could possibly be a good idea? I must imagine everyone there is single and the sole resident of their household. Can you imagine sharing your Amazon account with someone? I know A Certain Someone wouldn’t like Amazon trying to recommend the latest XBOX 360 game to her. Recommendations are personal. Netflix allows you to tailor your queue to your tastes — and the Netflix Profile was crucial for this level of personalization (at least, for those of us who are not single). Now, it seems they’ll be forcing people with potentially disparate tastes (or do households all share one monolothic opinion when it comes to movie-going?) to either micro-manage their queues (okay, you drag your movie to slot 2, i’ll put my next movie in slot 3, now you 4, me 5…what? you’re putting THAT in your queue? quit it!) or to get multiple accounts.

I assume they’ll have no problem with multiple accounts under one household. Ka-ching!

Are you a Netflix customer and are you hoping they’ll stop the madness? It’s quite unlikely they’ll listen. But you can try! Call their customer service to complain: 1 (888) 638-3549. Or, if petitions are your thing, visit Save Netflix Profiles and sign the petition. However, be warned that according to Hacking Netflix, “Netflix spokesperson Steve Swasey said that the decision to eliminate Profiles is a ‘final decision.’”

Um, whaaaa? Ubuntu (which readers of this blog should recognize as a flavor of Linux) is apparently the newest rallying cry for the Celtics!

Can you name the Boston Celtics’ new rallying cry? It’s something the team chants…not the fans.

The word is “Ubuntu.” It comes from the Bantu languages of Southern Africa and means, loosely, “I am because of you.”

WBUR’s Martha Bebinger explains.

According to Twitter:

It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%.

And yet, I can’t tell you how many times I saw the damn Whale while trying to use Twitter yesterday during the WWDC keynote. I’m not a Twitter hater, but I’d like to see them not boast about their uptime stats as a sole success metric. After all, up and serving error pages is not the same as up and serving a usable application.

Whoops! Proving that I myself am not error-free, I went back and re-read their post before saving this one…turns out the Whale was served 4% of the time during the peak load:

About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.

Dodged that bullet.

On a slightly related note: Save the whales!.

New “The Daily Show” correspondent Wyatt Cenac thinks the Democratic primaries are as boring as the second season of “Lost.”

A polar bear on a tropical island? There are SO many reasons that is amazing!