FriendFeed Fever Inspires Me To Use It For Movie Recommendations

June 11th, 2008

Today I noticed something rather bizarre on FriendFeed. Netflix is one of the services you can pull into your FriendFeed, and today something was unplugged that pulled in some recent adds to my Netflix queue, one of them being the movie Amelie.

So here we have one link to the movie Amelie on FriendFeed, with a picture of the DVD cover and – 28 likes, and 30 comments.

FriendFeed: Amelie

WTF? I mean, it’s a great movie and all, but all this conversation around one little movie?

Still, the fact that people are rampantly liking movies in FriendFeed might be very useful for generating movie recommendations. While logged in, click on “Show best of: day”. Then click a Netflix icon to show only Netflix activity. Since you’re in the “best of” area, the list will be sorted sorts by likes. Boom, instant movie recommendations from your peers (12 Monkeys, Enchanted, Becoming Jane, and The Station Agent appeared for me).

Steve Rubel feels there’s a lot of value in this information, too. He’s totally into FriendFeed now, writing a series of posts on how awesome it is. In FriendFeed Can Disrupt Search And Reshape Advertising, Rubel talks about how FriendFeed is creating “easily searchable content created by people you trust”. Spot on.

Just expand the movie concept above to all the services FriendFeed supports, and it becomes clear how big this could be. FriendFeed is pulling in a ton of data, and a ton of conversation (see above image) is being created around it, adding even more value. Yelp reviews, Amazon products – how long will it be before the big folks start complaining that FriendFeed is “stealing” the conversation around products?

Yes, I have FriendFeed fever, and the prescription is: more FriendFeed…