pragmar

Thanks, I wrote the backend in Django - but most of the heavy lifting is javascript. Django more or less is just populated by a cronjob and then caches the results of the Netflix odata API.

Thanks! Yeah, I can see how it looks a little out of place. It's clickable (hides the filter sidebar), but the fact that wasn't obvious is good input..

I did stumble on to Instant Watcher midway through development. It's a great concept - I especially like the aggregation of review information. IW covers the full spectrum of search, recommendations and queue management. Qwikstant is much simpler by comparison, partially by virtue of not cutting off more than I could chew (also working fulltime), but also because I was scratching my own itch and search was the issue I was trying to solve.

Excellent point - I'd noticed that too, but hadn't gotten around to delaying the transition or alternatively placing it elsewhere. I just wrote it down on the todo list. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm definitely considering some form in independent verification of the Netflix user rating system and was considering a series of icons that would display underneath the program info. The only concern is that I'd want to keep it visually not too busy - there's some visual design considerations that would need to be thought through.

The developer here. Moreso it's a vacation project. I started it after the Netflix redesign and put it down until two weeks ago when I was motivated to finish. I woke up and saw the Netflix Prize article on HN, and thought it was an interesting foil. It contains absolutely no elements of the recommendation system - relying on search speed as the main benefit.

Edit: grammar.

Thanks for the idea. Tor sounds a bit challenging (legally) -but it would be isolated. Will give it some thought..

I'd like to clarify one point. That is the Social Security hasn't been pay as you go since a commission headed by Alan Greenspan put forward legislation to deal with the baby boomers in the 80s. Under Reagan, Social Security went from pay-go to a trust fund. The social security crisis is not a matter of depleted resources in trust (some 2.4 trillion in 2009 - http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2009/4a....), but a crisis of whether the US government will pay these Treasury Bonds at face value or not. The real crisis is the government not having the political will to tax in order to pay its debts.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/fundFAQ.html#n7

try the sample of "500 miles high" here: http://www.amazon.com/Chick-Corea-Songbook-Manhattan-Transfe...

specifically the first two notes of the female lead (some-day) in the audio clip - some suspicious processing going on there.

They didn't fold, but they suffered a massive drop in usership. They rolled out a performance overhaul in June 2004 after the majority of users had already given up on the site.

http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-ph...

Incidently, the blogger above was fired for posting about the release, so it would seem they had some other serious corporate issues beyond performance.

I think you struck on an important point. For clients Wordpress is a godsend. If you quit contracting or the client needs to change developers for one of a thousand reasons there's a massive pool of talent that can step right in and make adjustments. I've taken over Wordpress sites and the learning curve is almost flat (save a few weird plugins). Anyways, it's a whole lot better of a situation for clients, developers and productivity in general than the days when everyone had a custom framework that solved the same basic CMS issue.

I'm going through this somewhat myself, albeit with a website I released last week. I've started to leave thoughtful comments on blogs that relate (with the website as the author name/url), answering relevant questions on yahoo answers and so on with the website sourced. Marketing feels dirty and unproductive, but it is really something I think I'll just need to get over. At my last job, marketing outnumbered developers 4 to 2. At the time I thought it weird, but I'm beginning to see some reason behind it now. My advice would be to put some serious time into a marketing strategy, and give it a budget even if it's a shoestring.