Netflix and RSS

I love Netflix. I have been a
member for over a year and I think it is just the best thing since peanut butter.

These guys are figuring out ways to spend their capital from their
IPO and have made some interesting moves lately, but their use of RSS was not one
of the better ones.  I can just see how it happened.  An engineer has been
reading RSS feeds himself and promoted the idea of using the technology up through
to the business people who then handed back a spec that lacked a basic understanding
of the technology.  Here’s what happened:

Netflix recently published an RSS feed to monitor your movie queue. 
The way it works is that every movie on your queue is represented as a single RSS
entry.   Each time your queue is processed, the RSS file is re-written with
the new queue list.  So as you may already be able to predict, for someone like
me, with almost 200 movies in the queue (don’t ask), the feed doubles every time a
movie is shipped. Within 2 days I have over 600 entries in my reader all waiting for
me to read them. Yikes!

Not a bad concept guys, but just publish the entire list as a single
RSS entry each time.