Last year, one of the ‘cool things’ in the weblog world was “getting Scobelized.” This either meant reading Robert Scoble’s weblog or being mentioned in it, I can’t remember now, but everyone was mentioning it and the vibe only got more intense when he did the really interesting and far too short-lived Talking Moose weblog. I actually read and was mentioned in both and this website still get hits from a TM discussion forum message I posted, although I never claim to have been Scobelized.
Robert is generally cool guy, even if he is having a self-described midlife crisis, but he seems to have fallen into one of the Internet’s hidden traps and gotten himself NetFlixed. This word, which I am claiming right here and now to have coined myself, refers to falling in love with a service/company called NetFlix that seems to good to be true. Like most everything else in this life that seems to good to be true, NetFlix doesn’t measure up although it often takes afflicted individuals a few months to realize the trap in which they have been ensnared. I myself fell for it. I was able to break free from one side of the trap but am still occasionally afflicted by the other.
NetFlix, for the uninitiated, is a service that provides one with DVDs through the mail for a monthly subscription fee. There are several different levels of service but the main offering costs $19.95 and allows subscribers to have three DVDs out at any one time. Once you sign up, you build a list of wanted DVDs and they are sent to you with a pre-addressed, stamped mailer in which you return them. There is no limit on the length of time you can keep a DVD. However, the next disk on your list will not be sent until the company receives one back from you. The library is quite extensive and I went through it with gleeful abandon for awhile, using them as a way to see old films I’d never seen before and seeing others long before they got onto HBO or Showtime. The warehouse was (still is?) in San Jose so the turnaround time was very short. For months I was quite happy.
Until I hit the big problem, the one that cost them my business. Eventually your backlist has been viewed. You’ve seen every Hitchkock and Ford, all the Monty Python TV shows, every newish release. What you’re left with is a list that only gets added to when a new DVD is released. Instead of getting a real deal and watching 10-12 a month, you’re only seeing four or five and starting to question the cost. And some films on your list just never seem to get sent your way even though they’ve been on it for months and even though no others are being sent to you. This is simply because NetFlix actually only has a small quantity of some disks and whenever these do come back to stock someone else gets them first. Complain away, as I did, but it won’t help.
The other side is that NetFlix is a spammer. Maybe not directly, perhaps the unwanted mail comes through some associates or partner program. But come it does, at least a couple of times a week. And we all know that businesses that benefit from spam suck and should be punished. Severely! A minor problem is that the company requires you to let them set a cookie before accessing the site. If you won’t, all you can see is a page cleverly named entryTrap.html.
So Robert, enjoy the disks while you can. Perhaps some of the availability issues, which after all are only exacerbated when more people sign up, have been fixed in the year since I was a subscriber. I think, though, one day you’ll agree with me that you’ve been NetFlixed.
BillSaysThis 