Inveni - Personalized. Social. Netflix Discovery and Management

[Aaron]

Hello Everyone,
My name is Aaron Weber I have spent the last year building a service that replicates many of the features on the Netflix friend section, but also goes way beyond that.  I just launched a new website called Inveni.com (http://www.inveni.com) at Tech Crunch Disrupt yesterday.  It is 100% free and is built for Netflix lovers!  I would love you to try it and give me feedback on what you like and don't like.

Here are some features we have now:
- Import your ratings and Netflix queue data.
- Manage your Netflix queue.
- Invite your Facebook friends or friends via email to join
- You can look at your friends ratings and queue.
- Have the ability to send Inveni friends or anyone on Facebook one click recommendations.
- Get new human filtered recommendations based on millions of crowd matched movies.
- Dual recommendations for more than one person.
- Ability to filter any list by Netflix streaming, Netflix Bluray or Netflix DVD.
- Get recommendations and alerts on new releases.
- Firefox browser plug in to save or rate movies anywhere (Yahoo Movies, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix, and many more) and the info ends up in your Netflix account.
And many more other cool features!
- Back up your Netflix Ratings and Queue

Again, we built this for you so if there is anything else you would like to see, let us know and we will build it.

Thanks!
Aaron Weber
http://www.inveni.com
(Small start up out of Minnesota)

[sevenstars]

If it imports my Netflix ratings, why does the signup process ask me to rate movies again?

[Hitch]

I agree. Also, why is there only some of my rated movies imported? The recommendations I'm getting are movies I have already seen.

[sevenstars]

Same here. It's saying I have rated about 400 movies, when I have rated over 2500.

And it's recommending me Old School because I liked Fight Club (!)

[Microwaved]

It's definitely clunky right now. I was reading in the help section that Netflix only allows them to import so many ratings at a time.

I think they have a lot of work to go before they are what the friends feature used to be. A lot of work.

[sevenstars]

What would be really nice is if the site could access our complete friends data from Netflix (I believe it still exists in their system) so we wouldn't have to ask all our friends to sign up for yet another site, but I guess Netflix doesn't make that data available to third parties like it does the feeds.

[Aaron]

I wish we could do this, but you are correct Netflix does not provide this data.

Sorry for the trouble, but I think if you give us a chance and continue to give us feedback we can make you forget about Netflix's friend section. :)

[Aaron]

Hello Microwaved,
Netflix does limit the amount of ratings we can get, but in the back-end we will eventually get them for you. There is nothing you need to do, but be patient and we should have them in a day or two. Hopefully faster in the next week as we release a new improvement to the import tool.

I think there may be a lot of work to go before you forget about the Netflix friend's feature, but if you continue to give us great feedback like this I know we can match it and even improve upon it.

Aaron

[Aaron]

Hello Scott / Hitch,
Your ratings will be imported over two days. We are working on steps that will speed this up, but for now you should see the majority of them come through over time.

Regarding Old School similar to Fight Club. That is very strange. Our system is based on Human Filtered recommendations. This means that our recommendation algorithm suggests similar matches and users agree or disagree with these connections. The more users do this, the better our recommendations get. As part of this we have a game where the person who connects the most similar movies to a movie become a "Guru" of that movie. Think Mayor ships for movies. If you do not agree with the similar matches, there is a good chance you could become guru ship of that movie if you match it better.
http://www.inveni.com/Movies/Details/4eb1183c-043a-4c68-a193-64cf88...


Thanks again for pointing this out.

[Aaron]

We are going to add in a setting that detects if the new user has connected their Netflix account. If they have, we will allow the user to skip this step.

The reason we have five ratings required is that it helps users have great recommendations as soon as they enter the site if they did not connect an account.

Great feedback! We will have this fixed soon.

[Aaron]

Hello Everyone,
Thank you for trying out our service! I will reply to each of your comments individually.

Aaron

[Fuhr]

Like the idea but just started checking it out. Any chance of already written reviews being brought over from Netflix? Also, a Google Chrome plug in would be great.

[Knaldskalle]

Hum.

Took a look at the site. Clicking on Terms of Service and Privacy Policy links at the bottom of the Signup page only leads to the signup intro, not the promised information. If you have terms of service and a privacy policy, shouldn't they be available for people to read? I mean, if we're signing away the souls of our first-born sons it would be nice to know in advance.

Contact Us, About Us and API links on the front page have the same problem. If I can't contact you and you're not giving me any info about your site, why should I sign up, giving you my email info?

Even clicking on the Inveni logo on the top of the Signup page doesn't take me to the front page, it just reloads the signup page.

This is really basic stuff that's missing or not working. You sure you're ready to go to Beta yet?

 

(FF 3.6.13, WinXP SP3)