5-star Netflix?

NetFlix claims to have invented the 5-star rating?

photomatt’s link to The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site makes me miss my NetFlix. They provide an incredible service, founded in their fantastic website, unlike the Canadian version.

I did get grin and frown when I read in NetFlix Director of User Interface Engineering Sean Kane bio for an upcoming conference:

Netflix invented the now ubiquitous 5-Star Rating widget that is used across the web today.

Come on, celebrate your accomplishments, but don’t be grandiose.

I have a passion for rating and recommendation systems. My passion is not founded in Mathematical ability…  more on that some other time.

I had not previously heard of the NetFlix Prize of $1 million for improving Netflix’s recommendation system by 10% percent, or seen Hacking Netflix.com (and NetFlix’s competitors).

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Comment (1)

  1. Sean Kane wrote::

    Fair Enough. I guess it does sound a little grandiose on the surface :) . The point I make in the presentation is not that we invented 5-star rating, those have been around forever. The point has to do with the use of the 204 server response to have a cross-browser refreshless-update on the website back in 1999. As far as anyone here knows, we were the first to use that type of widget in a web rating system.

    Friday, November 17, 2006 at 10:26 am #