[mos1]

To quote NetFlix: "Friends is a feature on the Netflix Web site that’s been used by less than two percent of all subscribers since we added the feature in 2004."

That strikes me as a wholly adequate explanation.

[thesethings]

If you read the (unfortunately unthreaded and super-hard to browse) comment thread, there were a lot of users questioning that.

I guess I'd like to know more about "active" users, and social features.

Also... in 2010 it's just super surreal in a domain as vast as "movies," to not have deep social features to help people manage and discover.

I'm buying the OP's suggestion that Friends was turning up tons of recommendations that you can't stream (that part is the studios' fault, not Netflix's), and it was leading to a lot of dead-end experiences.

But I just really don't buy that Netflix's longterm strategy is to get less social. They are too ahead of the curve, and too smart to think/do that.

My personal theory is that they are overhauling Friends and social in general, behind the scenes.

[drivingmenuts]

But how many people were questioning as a percentage of their entire userbase?

[waterlesscloud]

They never really found the way to make Friends work. It was always cumbersome.

I suspect what's really happened here is that whatever internal group was responsible for Friends as decided to hide their failure to make it work behind a screen of "no one wants it".

[foomarks]

I loved their .02 feature which was essentially like short little tweets you could send to other friends. It was super easy to use and before my friends ever understand how to use Twitter, they knew exactly how to use this feature.