We are sending out this email today to folks who review movies. If you've already uploaded a photo, great. If you haven't, this is your wake up call. We're hoping to totally wipe out all those (random) automatic cinematic avatars we give you, and start seeing lots of personal icons out there. (Remember: You can change yours whenever you want.)Don't you think it will make the site much cooler? Spread the word.
POST SCRIPT: If y'all have questions about avatars, explore the other posts here about avatars.
19 comments:
Thanks for the email, Michael! The avatars are a nice touch.
I spend most of my time posting about the shows I watch on two animation and tv show boards. I really like a personal name and avatar. I sometimes change it to reflect my mood, or leave it standard so people can know it's me across boards. I'm a bit,,, ok alot of a show forum junkie and have been having some trouble tying in my rented DVD's. I get most of my "want" list from others discussions.
Now I'll see if I'm signed in properly... Nope, I'm not. I'll have to work on that or maybe I can't use my review name on the blog.
I've been curious about those automatic avatars; were they generated based on users' favorite genres or movies, or were they random?
Personal avatars are a nice touch. Allows you to be who wish to to be, even for the moment.
Did the Recommendation Star go the way of the Purple Dude or is it just a temporary glitch?
pete: yes. Alas, no glitch. The recommendation shooting star has also been retired. Our research continues to bear out that a cleaner interface, with fewer distractions, is easier for everyone. My sendoff limerick summed it up:
Goodbye to our ol’ shooting star
His service to Netflix, subpar
Marginal queue-adds lead to
Loss of our doo-dads;
Now the box art is cleaner, by far.
When are "non-rented" movies going to show up again on the friends slider????
I'm really digging the "% like me" deal, is there a way I can search for people most like me... to see if they've watched movies I'm thinking of, or adding them as a friend? I've been searching through some of my ratings looking for people with the highest % like me, and 79% is the highest I've found. It would be cool if I could just bring up a list of all users and sort them by % like me or something.
Thanks and I love netflix!
Mike,
I think I might cry. I really enjoyed both Purple Dude and Shooting Star even if my page loads were slower. Any chance that you could re-introduce them as a personalized setting (ie only if a user opted for them, perhaps with a disclaimer of the slower page loads)?
I'm sad that the recommendation star is gone. That was really helpful. The purple guy I can live without, but oh well.
You might want to email those members whose avatars are not posting. If done incorrectly, it might look like it's up to them, but the rest of us only get the red X box.
I, too, am sorry to learn of the demise of the shooting star. I liked being able to scan down my queue for something that was almost sure to be a "win" for me to balance out the more experimental choices. My connection is already slow that the extra load time wasn't an issue.
Besides, the stars were pretty!
I too enjoyed quickly picking a movie in my queue with a star and move it up if I've had a run of movies that failed to inspire me.
And I know that I'm completely neurotic, but I like to limit the number of movies that I rate as "Not Interested" to only those titles which are recommended for me. I have found that by clearing a "Not Interested" ranking on movies not recommended for me I get more recommendations of movies that interest me. So, every couple of days I look at my "Not Interested" rating and eliminate those without recommendation stars. I can still figure out which are recommended, but now I need to go to each movie's page to find out.
Sorry guys, but I just don't get this whole avatar thing. People just want to know about the movies, not what our pets look like or what our favorite movie stills are. The %'s are certainly helpful, but why not save the download time of all these totally distracting images to bring back the shooting stars and the purple guy that actually serve some purpose?!
pt: When faced with a list of 50 member reviews, it's hard to pick out the most interesting or relevant ones according to my taste. Scanning the list by looking for unique user icons is one way of narrowing down. You can often glean a lot of info about a user simply by what icon they choose, adding that much more context to their comments.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply, Mike, and I agree, in that I welcome the %'s, but don't you find that like-minded flixers soon become recognizable by their screen names? Unless of course they've gone the cloaking-device route of being inmate #GH , in which case they seem to be the least likely ones to want to stand out in the crowd with a personalized visual ident.
As I don't have any personal images that I'm sure are not copyrighted and which would make good (or at least logical) avatars, is there any way to either a) give members a choice of Netflix generated images (I'm really tired of being Superman, particularly as I'm female) or back to no image at all?) Frankly the images add a lot of visual clutter to the page.
I tried to change my picture and it keeps reverting to the old one. I called for help. I spoke to a nice person who could see my new picture, even if I could not. I was told to log out from my account and then log in. That worked! I could see the new picture! Then, later the same day, my picture had reverted again. I tried the log out trick. No dice. I called the help line again. This time, the nice person could only see my old 'photo. My picture is NOT obscene. The person on the help line agreed. My picture is EXACTLY 150x150 pixels, so size is not the problem. This is not a national emergency. I mean, why should I care if the wrong picture is displayed? It's just that I followed instructions and got a mysterious result. I do not like mystries -- check my queue!
[:-)] Mark
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