Netflix Phases Out Friend Feature, Makes This Netflixer Sad

March 24, 2010 - By Erin Stuelke

Netflix’s Vice President of Product Management, Todd Yellin, clarified that with the new changes to the Movie Display Page they will be phasing out the Friends Feature.  He stated that the Friends feature was used by less than 2% of Netflix subscribers and the move is to free up resources “to support and maintain the things that benefit all Netflix members as the service evolves – more devices for streaming and better encoding, for example.”

I’ve always felt the Netflix Friend feature was a buried gem in the Netflix interface.  I enjoyed seeing what my friends were watching and found it interesting to see who I was most compatible with movie-wise.  So, needless to say, I’m sad to see this feature go.  But I think the reason the feature was little-used was because it wasn’t very user-friendly.

I consider myself computer-savvy and even I had to dig under the surface to find it.  There wasn’t a tab across the top to easily access friends and inviting others always felt a little convoluted to me.  Not to mention, you were assigned a random nickname like “XF 1234567″ and changing that was also non-intuitive.  Several of my friends kept the default nickname and that made it difficult for me to remember who belonged to which name.

I think had Netflix designed a better interface for the Friends Feature, more than 2% of users would have certainly taken advantage of it.  Did you know about the Friends Feature?  Are you going to miss its presence?

Friends Update [Netflix]