What the name for when a company seems to have stagnated, based on the lack of change in their front-end, even though you're sure there're engineers diligently toiling away at things?<p>Netflix's frontend has not have any real improvement in quite a while. "Share on Facebook"? "Kids Mode"? "Watched by Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)"? C'mon!<p>Where's the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB integration? Why does their search still have zero options to help you search? Where's Netflix's rendition of A Better Queue or Instant Watcher?<p>The shutting down of the public API wouldn't be such a big deal if they paid more attention to their frontend. It also seems that Netflix thinks that if they don't bring up the fact that there are movies that aren't on Netflix, we won't notice.<p>The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. I <i>know</i> there are engineers there working on hard problems (the scale they operate on is amazing) but in the midst of the current mobile and UX revolution, all they've manged to do is add a frame around the results page so it's easier to search again?<p>OKCupid is another site that comes to mind where it looks like the front end is just stuck and has stopped progressing.<p>(Gmail gets a pass because Google just gave up and made Inbox instead.)
APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service.<p>Google once allowed search queries via a SOAP interface. That's gone. They also dropped RSS feeds. But the API for submitting paid ads, that works. The paid cloud services are fine.<p>Twitter doesn't like third party Twitter clients any more and will pull the API key of anyone who writes one. A third party client might have a spam ("sponsored tweet") filter.
It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store.<p>From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.
I do not understand the backend reason for this (and did not when I saw the announcements about this two years ago): while I can see not wanting to provide a full movie metadata API, having "is this or is this not available on Netflix right now" seems like a really important API to have, one that allows websites people use to browse and find movies to funnel users into Netflix (and seems a natural fit for their very popular affiliate program).<p>Apple actually provides massive database dumps of everything available in iTunes, for free, to anyone who asks, which is why virtually every music discovery site or app has a "buy this on iTunes" button, not just "a small set of developers whose applications have proven to be the most valuable for many of our members" (which is a quote from the Netflix developer blog earlier this year; you have to pull this from Google Cache now, sadly).<p>I don't see how "stream/rent this on Netflix" is a bad thing for Netflix (but am totally willing to believe I am not "seeing far enough", because this is not my area of expertise, hence why I am asking this question: I hope to be enlightened ;P). (edit:) I guess maybe for the same reason Uber and Lyft don't want APIs? Because they want to dominate the end user searching and discovery experience as well? But like, even Walmart and Amazon offer APIs... ;P.
In case this wasn't obvious to you, Netflix is not the internet's friend, fun examples include:<p>- Browser DRM (making it impossible to produce a fully functional AND open source browser)<p>- HDCP-for-sockets (e.g., to replace HTTPS with something they can tie to platform DRM-protected key exchange -- <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html" rel="nofollow">http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m...</a>)<p>... and now this.
They announced the retirement 5 months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891171</a>
At least these news reminded me that I wanted to pull the plug on the membership for a long time, so I just did that. Not in the protest but because selection (in Canada at least) is abysmal. I wonder how many people relied on 3rd party software to manage and view their Netflix and whether it causeS number of cancellations to be big enough for them to notice.
Too bad, since there's basically no way to find what good content Netflix has using their inferior tools. From accounts which are permanently contaminated by kid shows (let your kid watch a few shows, you'll never get anything except cartoons recommended ever again, irreversible, no way to edit or start over) to discovery algorithms that just give you the same five shows (that you've already watched, on Netflix) over and over...
So now sort by recommendation ranking is truly gone even via other websites, along with Netflix being eliminated from data search such as apps that help you find where a show is available to watch (legally) across all services?<p>Wow. I do not get this at all.<p>I can't quite understand why so many big services avoid obvious features related to ranking and discovery. Is it because they've found that people just burn through their top 10% of recommended content, and then quit the service? This seems hard to believe. Is there some other reason I'm missing?<p>I've been calling this "value evasion" to refer to obvious features that are consistently avoided by many top web services, and working to understand what the point of hiding that functionality is for a while now. There must be really clear reasoning as to why it's a bad idea, but I have to admit I'm stumped.
This is why I see the trouble with the semantic web. If even large guys like Netflix are unwilling to share their API publicly then semantic web becomes something like a really expensive toy that people with very large pockets can afford or you end up scraping everyone to death. This is why I think strategies like Kimono and Import.io will fail.