Netflix works. Not much else to say about it. As Cuban has mused, it really doesn’t seem like someone hawking downloadable movies (AOL or iTV anyone) is going to unseat them anytime soon. Evertime I visit Netflix to update my queue, they seem to have a new feature that makes the whole website experience that much better.

Ok, so they have a good website, great AJAX that is practical, but they are missing one monster of a thing: recommendations that don’t suck. Rarely do any of their suggestions work for me. They are so predictable that I actually now find myself rating movies in a way that is counter-intuitive. For instance, I like the Grateful Dead, but I sure as heck am marking them “not interested” because if I don’t, I’ll end up with recommendations for all of their concerts that are on DVD. I don’t want to rent concert DVD’s, but their doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Netflix this.

Move on to Pandora, which I spent a whole weekend listening to through my stereo and HTPC. Amazing. Now, I can add artists and songs that I like and they recommend songs that I should like. And it keeps getting smarter the more I rate songs that I hear and the more that I give a thumbs down to the ones I don’t.

Netflix has the users already signed up and we have proflile pages and we spend quite a bit of time browsing around to find new movies to add to our never-ending queues. Beefing up the social network aspect of what they already have in place seems to make sense. Let me have a Netflix Profile page that I can share with friends– wrap that up w/ Fandango already and sell tickets to movies. Let me place movie trailers on my profile page, give me a blog, let me rate other users based on how their recommendations panned out. Take the folks who take the time to write the most reviews and give them a louder voice. In many instances, I could care less about what the critics think. I want to hear from my peers, they are the ones who I trust.

So Netflix, if you are listening, please, please fix your recommendations and consider really bulking up your social networking offers. You are so close to being perfect, like Pandora, it hurts.