The Aptly Named, Sam’s Blog

I’ve returned to using Netflix this year and it’s working out great for Liz and me, both film lovers. Here are some thoughts on my recent Netflix experience.

I noticed the other day that when Netflix shows me ratings for a movie that I haven’t rated (the red stars), it is not showing me what I thought that was. The red stars show me what Netflix thinks I will rate the movie rather than the average of what others have rated. It is a prediction. This is not news, but is news to me. I don’t like it. I’d like to see the average rating given by others instead of the predicted rating for me. I’ve taken to hovering over each film’s title or image to get that information. It’s annoying but doable and I prefer it to the misleading red stars.

Recently when Liz was away for a few weeks, I had a plan to watch a bunch of action flicks and such-like that I wanted to see and knew the she wouldn’t want to see. Not that she isn’t into action films; the other day we greatly enjoyed Inglourious Basterds. So I browsed for those films that I had heard of and those that folks recommended, added them to my queue, and moved them to the top. Soon enough they started showing up and I had a great time catching up on that genre. Now that Liz is back, the queue is as it was before she left and I’m faced with a slight problem. When I come across a film in the aforementioned genre, I would like to store it for another similar time in the future. However, I can’t just add it to my queue without constant annoying maintenance. I’d like a feature using which I can make a list of movies called “Sam’s Must-See Action Flix”. When Liz travels, I can make this list my active queue in one click. And then one-click should return the active queue to the regularly scheduled list when she returns. Simple.

The “Watch Instantly” feature of streaming movies is most excellent. I love it, despite the fact that it causes my browser to crash once each time I use it. I’ve been using it to see movies I’ve enjoyed before but not seen in a long time and also for those times when you just want to see something right away but aren’t in the mood for the DVD lying on the table. It would be most awesome if it worked directly with my PlayStation 3 but from what I’ve read that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

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I don't have any major need for spreadsheets, so I'm definitely not inclined to buy some software for it. But there are a few little things for which I could use one and that is why it's great to see a free web application from Google that provides it.

I started to use Google Spreadsheets yesterday and found it very convenient and simple to use. It offers some basic functionality for now but that's ok since it's only a limited test. It can import and export XLS and CSV files at the moment, so I converted my few files from a simple text format into CSV and they were smoothly imported. The application looks quite slick. This is the first application from Google that looks a lot like a desktop application. It has menus near the top with similar items as a standard desktop application. There are buttons for the usual suspects; Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo and Redo. It has collaborative features to let multiple users edit the same file and provides a chat interface too. I haven't tried that yet. I'm looking forward to more such applications. I'm guessing that I'll use some of them while others I won't, picking and choosing depending on usage, usability and desktop alternative availability.

And now for the idle speculation part, which kinda builds on what I first read a long time ago. This new product makes me wonder that with the known and unknown components below their web applications, Google probably has a development platform for hosting applications on their infrastructure. I wonder if they would make it available to developers too. Let's call it the environment for Google Developers, or eGoD . They could potentially let eGoD applications reside on the developer's own hardware, but they can't really fulfill their "mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" if it's not on their own infrastructure*. A reason for developers to let Google host their eGoD applications may be to guarantee good performance by utilizing a large scale distributed system that is managed and maintained by Google. Another reason would be that all eGoD applications would be "local" to each other and to Google services so if they wish to exchange information, they would be able to do so very efficiently. I've read time and again that infrastructure is one of Google's main strengths and I think that is absolutely true.

A Google branded word processor based on Writely will surely come out soon. I don't know if these applications are the beginning of a challenge to Microsoft Office, at least not until the technologies and interfaces are more mature. However they demonstrate the capability of this imaginary eGoD platform. Such a development and hosting environment is bound to be disruptive in the desktop application ecosphere. Google may go after a big slice of the pie with Office, leaving the niche products to the small developers. Just like Microsoft did with their platform, Windows.

* By the way, they provide Google Base for people to give them their deep web information.

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I got a promotional email from Netflix today. They would like me to forward an offer of a free month of service to my friends and family. A few months ago I would have sent it out to some people, but Netflix's service has gotten progressively worse in recent times. I'll continue to be a subscriber for a while to see how it goes, but there is no way that I'm recommending it to others at this time.

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