I want my Netflix Ratings

My wife and I currently have separate Netflix accounts. But I’m watching movies less these days, so I’m about to cancel mine, and just share her account. But I have spent years entering data into Netflix. I would like to be able to pull out that data before shutting down my account.

Netflix could add this feature, but they won’t. I would be happy to pay a few dollars to website/service that would help me pull out my data.

The important part is that this is not just about Netflix, but rather an issue with many websites.

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I Want a Better Way to Reward Artists and Creators

Let’s say you borrowed or downloaded a book or a CD and you really liked. Now you’d like to reward the artist, author or creator for their work, so that they will be able to continue producing more of the things that you enjoy. So if you ask: “how can I reward the creator?”, the typical answer will be, go and buy their CD, book, etc.

Being an author myself (I published two books on technology), I know very well that only a tiny part of the money paid for the product goes to its creator. Most of the money is being consumed by the middle man (resellers) and the publishing house. e.g. in my case I was getting 10% of the net profit (not the book price!) made by the publisher. Which was about 2% of the book’s price and even less if it was sold at a discount.

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I Want A Better Email Whitelisting Integration

Every time I register for a new online service I get a message:

Thank you for registering with example-service.com.

Please add registration@example-service.com to your whitelist page and make sure to check your bulk folder if you don’t receive the service activation email.

We have three potential problems here:

1. Some people don’t know how to add an email address to a whitelist.
2. One needs to copy-n-paste the email to be whitelisted, go to their email provider website, dig through the options to find the whitelisting screen and enter the email address.
3. If the customer’s email service doesn’t place the spam mail in the bulk folder, but deletes it, the customer will never see the service activation email. In most cases that would mean that they won’t be able to activate their account, nor they will be able to re-register with the same email address. This is a dead-end. It exists because the whitelisting happens too late. The customer needs to whitelist the email address first and only then have example-service.com send the activation email.

Since a majority of email users use a handful of email providers, clearly this is an opportunity for someone to provide a new service that solves this problem.

This new web service routes people to the appropriate page within their webmail system to add a whitelist entry for, say, an e-commerce site they are doing business with.

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A New Service To Update Address After House Moving

Many people move houses every few years or even more often. The problem is that when they move they need to remember to notify various organizations about their address change. It’s not easy to remember who needs to be notified. And sometimes it takes more than a single notification (as your requests happen to fall in the cracks). At times failing to update the address could cause losses and inconveniences.

Yes, one could pay the post office service to forward their address, but this is only a temporary solution and it doesn’t work for organizations that require you to keep your address updated not only for the mail purposes (e.g. health insurances, driver license, etc.).

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I want a better domain transfer mechanism

Recently I have bought and sold a few websites and the experience of domain transfers was quite horrible.

First I acquired a site that was originally hosted by MelbourneIT, which is sold as yahoo hosting (i.e. Yahoo outsources the service to MelbourneIT). I did some research before starting the transfer, and learned that nether MelbourneIT nor Yahoo are helpful with the transfer and what one needs to do is just wait for the FOA (”Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer”) request to expire and ICANN forcefully take over the domain and transferring it to the new registrar. In other words you need to get the authorization code for the domain name, and initiate the transfer and just wait for about a week.

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I want a better legal case history search engine.

The American legal system is confusing enough to work your way through it. It would seem the least we can do is index and tag cases that have passed through the court system better so we can use them for reference. If you have something happen to you that you think is just not right, it should be just as easy as asking google to find relevant case results.

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I want a better Airtravel Experience: Handling Delays

It’s not unusual that a flight gets delayed or canceled and one has to find an accommodation, while waiting for the next flight. Just recently flying home from Castlegar, BC, we had several flights canceled one after another due to weather conditions, and eventually we boarded a plane, just to be told “Sorry, this plane won’t fly today… but check with the check-in desk - we might flight tomorrow”… And so we had to find an accommodation for that night, after spending the whole day in the airport.

This particular airport is known for frequent flight delays and cancellations (locals even nicknamed their town: “Cancelegar”), yet no arrangements are made to accommodate delayed travelers, not even a free shuttle to a hotel. And of course there are no waiting facilities at the airport itself other than the usual hard benches.

Overnight storage or lockers weren’t there either…

And apparently this is a similar situation with many other airports around the world. You buy the ticket and you hope to make it to your destination, but if anything goes wrong on the airline side, you are on your own…

One things is not clear is whether this should be a responsibility of the airlines, or the municipalities on whose premises the airports are located. Or both…

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I want a better FaceBook: communications

The way Facebook forces us to communicate with people just sucks. I either get an email from Facebook, telling me that I’ve a message and giving me a link to facebook’s site. Or I get an email with the actual message, but I can’t reply to it, because the From: address is set to garbage.

Obviously Facebook wants you to login and use their tools to communicate with people (and meanwhile sell you something). But I don’t want another set of tools - I already have my favorite mail program that I’m most familiar with.

At the moment I simply refuse replying to any messages coming that way and tell my friends to not message me via Facebook. Want my response - email me directly.

And that’s too bad. Facebook and other social networks could become a transparent layer connecting people and let end users choose their medium of communication, rather than forcing everybody to use their website.

At the moment I stay off Facebook, until they wake up and realize that they could do much better than they do now.

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I wanna better way to interact with social network sites

It seems a bit lame to me to get an email that tells me I have email. (Those of you who subscribe to multiple social networks know what I mean.)

It would be good to have an uber social net like a gmail InBox where, with a single sign-on, I could get all of my social network stuff.

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I want a better linkedin.com

Linkedin.com is a business social network, which I like because it’s not very noisy. I mainly use it as a great tool to maintain business contacts. The best part is that my contacts maintain their own records, saving my time. If someone changes their email address or job, I can easily find it the latest information with one click.

If you are on linkedin, you also know that some folks use it for marketing purposes and they have tens of thousands of contacts. These folks tend to send connection invitation to every email address they can put their hands on. And I don’t accept those invitations (my network includes only people that I’ve communicated with or met in person).

The problem is that I can’t decline those invitations in “bulk mode”, instead I have to go through each invitation and click several times before the invitation gets killed. I’ve contacted the support group a few times about this issue, but they don’t do anything about it.

Hopefully if enough people join my request, they will improve that part of the service.

Update: Jan 2008: Great news - linkedin.com just implemented that feature! Thanks to everybody who voted on the proposal!

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