I’m a Netflix customer. Since October 2000, I’ve enjoyed the no-hassle back-and-forth of DVDs waiting for me to find time to watch them. The alternative — finding time AND interest AND going to a store to rent a movie — seems almost as antiquated as the pre-ATM world. (There’s a world I wouldn’t want to have lived in!) I’m not an aficionado, so I’m quite satisfied with the “2 Out Lite Program,” which lets you keep only 2 discs out at a time, for a slightly reduced monthly fee.
The only problem with the whole arrangement is managing a single queue for two people (the kids don’t count, yet). My wife and I have overlapping, but not identical, tastes in movies. I feel it would be simple to have multiple ‘identities’ in a queue manager. Simple, technically, at least. We would still have to share a queue, unless we were prepared to pay for two accounts, but with two identities, we could rate movies independently and receive independent recommendations, and generally acknowledge that while we’re a unit, we’re not one person. The interface for offering this kind of feature is probably more complicated than the feature itself, and it may create more problems than it solves, but I’d love to hear more thoughts about this.
In general, software needs to go in two directions. First, applications need to expect a network, and, where possible, allow control over the network, whether via a server-based application or a fully network aware client application which exposes control interfaces. Second, computers need to understand the context of different operators. Think about the internet cafe, and then think about a two-person, one computer household. Somewhere in that wide swath, there is a growing space for software which doesn’t assume identity, even for ‘personal’ computers. Identity management is a pain in the a–, but various services (think webmail), have begun training each and every one of us to the ubiquity of access to our data. Only at shared machines where the sharing is limited to family/roommates are things more awkward. Both Windows and Mac OS X do have accounts and opportunities for separating the computing worlds between people, but the technical ability hasn’t brought along with it an interface simplicity that makes the feature worth the hassle.
I think there is more to work through here, and I hope I’m not contradicting myself too fully. I do want a separate Netflix queue.