Netflix split personailty
From time to time, I've followed the news on the Netflix million
dollar prize to improve their movie recommendation system
by 10% over their current algorithm. Supposedly one of the
biggest barriers to better recommendation accuracy is the "love
it or hate it" type of movie, for which few comparable examples
exist and opinions are widely divergent. Movies like Napoleon
Dynamite, Sideways or Lost in Translation.

I have no advice on this matter, but I have noticed some quirks
of using Netflix for a multi-member household that would seem
much easier to address. As far as I can tell, Netflix only allows
one queue and one set of ratings per account. So if you have
kids, who might rate a given children's program highly, Netflix
will constantly clutter up one's recommendations list with a huge
number of other suggested kiddy videos. In a sense, this is accurate.
Children tend to not be very fussy about what shows they like,
so they probably would like to watch a new DVD of Dora the
Explorer or whatnot. And since I tend to rate movies lower than
they do, it's harder to predict what I might like. But this produces
a huge and unhelpful bias towards kids videos in making a list of
what I might want to watch. A separate queue for kid's videos would
also be helpful to ensure an option like--"Send me no more than one
disc from the "children's" category at a time."

Having two or more rating accounts for you and a spouse, for example
would give much more useful predictive results. So instead of just
"Movies you'll love" they can make more useful predictions like:
Movie's you will love, but your wife will hate" or "Romantic comedies
that your wife will love but you will still be able to tolerate." Or even
"kid's videos that are actually entertaining for adults as well." I wonder
if there's an economic reason Netflix to not want to make it easy to
subdivide accounts into different personas...