Jason Lancaster

One of the more useful iPhone applications I’ve found and used goes beyond Apple’s SDK by installing a quick-glance menu on the iPhone’s “locked” screen. In it, you can add calendar items, mail, sms, or a variety of other things. It’s a great idea and something the iPhone is desperately missing.

So you can imagine my dismay when, after installing on my pwned (hacked) phone and thinking to myself, “this is a good product, perhaps I should buy it” I ran into a brick wall:

No. Not happening. You just can’t do this, no matter how cool your software is! This screen says two things to me:

1. Developer is overly confident that their software is the bomb, will never fail, never break, never act differently than a user might expect.
2. Developer wants distance from the users of his/her product because users like me are dumb and will contact them about stuff they just don’t want to be bothered with, like their bomb-less application crashing.

It’s great developers are finding an outlet outside of Apple’s App Store to sell applications but this one is not for me.

UPDATE: Netflix has decided to keep personal profiles!

Netflix emailed me last night:

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Netflix has chosen to delete any “sub-users” (or profiles) that you created. This was one of the many outstanding features that made Netflix so innovative. If the idea of having two profiles seems foreign to you, think about it like this:

1. You could have multiple queues that movies were delivered from and the ability to spread the total number of movies for your account among these queues.
2. With an additional profile, you could have a separate ratings system for a family member. This makes sense especially when your ratings might not coincide with someone else renting from Netflix.

And now, not only are they removing the feature but they trashing each of those profile’s data sets. All that time and energy spent maintaining those sub-profiles will be wasted when Netflix decides to delete them. The worst part of all of this is that they’re not offering any solutions other than to “print out your queue” and that “your rental history will be merged with the primary account holder’s history.” This is simply unacceptable.

I’ve been a long time supporter of Netflix. The service they provide and the innovation into the way we think about video rentals was simply incredible. Their website has probably the best recommendation system, review system and rating system out there. It was the first usable and true web 2.0 website I can think of.

Not anymore.

Their reasoning for this change is given in the message but it is important to note: this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers. Seriously? This will improve the website for the greater good of all customers? I don’t believe it and I’m not willing to sacrifice my data. I am not the only person who feels this way.

Great customer service would be to retain the profiles and improve support for profiles, offering an even better system for those that use the feature.

Satisfactory customer service would be to offer a migration solution to a new, full-fledged account if there was no way to retain an additional profile on your account.

Netflix’s decision is the worst case scenario. As of September 1st, my data will be deleted.

I’ve already downgraded my plan and begun to phase out my additional profiles. Lucky for me, I’m the primary account holder — I get to keep my data. But what about everyone else?

If you’re like me and looking for alternatives, here is a list of online rental services I’ve found:

• Blockbuster
• CafeDVD
• DVD Overnight
• Intelliflix

The airport has my baggage because there was some sort of bomb scare this morning at 10AM. They stopped distributing luggage and proceeded to call the fire department/bomb squad to come out and search everything before they allowed anything through. A Southwest employee said (after a frustrated mob practically attacked him) no one was telling anyone anything and it could be hours or even a day before we’d get our bags back so we could go home and worry about our luggage later. I’m assuming they are, of course, letting things through the baggage claims now but I honestly don’t know because no one from the airport told us what was going on and no one has returned my messages to the baggage claim department.

I love organized chaos! Go FLL and Southwest!