Netflix has an ongoing contest to award $1,000,000 to a programmer who manages to increase the relevancy of the site's movie recommendations by 10%. I'm not programmer, but thought it would be interesting to throw out an idea on how this could be achieved without an algorithm change.

I got around to joining Netflix last week and have had a fun time working through the inventory, rating movies I've seen, and working through the ratings of movies watched by friends of mine who use the service. Here is my proposal or improving my user satisfaction based on how I've used the service:

Let friends add movies to their friend's queues.

Here's why I think this will improve user satisfaction (through relevancy of recommendations) for Netflix users:

Alex thinks Black Hawk Down is an awesome movie. He can't stop talking about it. I haven't seen it. Our conversations about the movie generally go something like this:



But if Alex was a friend of mine on Netflix with queue adding permissions he could add the movie to my queue himself, causing it to eventually show up at my house.

• Alex would like this, because I'd actually get around to following his advice.
  
  
• I'd like it because I'm willing to assume the movie is decent based on Alex's recommendation. If he's passionate enough about it to add it to my queue, I'll willing to give it a try.

Now we could argue about whether the movie is as awesome as he claimed it was. That's a positive user experience for both of us.

Obviously, users would need to be able to choose between read and write permissions for queue edits and users would have to be able to see what's been added to their queues by their friends, but that shouldn't be very hard. If I really didn't watch to watch Black Hawk Down after Alex added it to my queue, I'd mark it as "Not Interested."

I think this is a million dollar idea because it:


Netflix is actually a very powerful social networking site already. In fact, I think you can find out more about people based on their Netflix reviews and queue that you can from the two hours they put into their MySpace account the first night they signed up (then ignored it).

Netflix users are passionate about movies and trust their movie-loving friend's recommendations. Leveraging the power of those relationships should lead to greater user satisfaction. It could also lead to more new referrals from friends as they build their Netflix friend network.

Netflix users who end up enjoying even one or two new movies per year based on friends queue additions will be satisfied movie watchers, and they'll have Netflix to thank for enabling the recommendations.

I don't believe non-programming changes to their strategies are eligible for the contest (and I didn't register), but I'd have no problem with a $1,000,000 check showing up in my next Netflix shipment.