Netflix Clues Into The Fact That You Don’t Want To Share Everything You’ve Watched On Facebook

We're all pretty proud to admit that we've watched Citizen Kane or any other legendary classic, but those late-night cartoons and goofy sob stories? Not so much. Part of the digital economy is sharing. If you've got a product, it's really only to grow so much as folks will talk about it online. Obviously, Netflix stands to gain a lot (new subscribers, keeping existing ones interested, etc.) by having you share your viewing habits with others on social media. But up until this week, that sharing was public by default, which caused many to pause before blasting to the entire world what they were watching.


Now, Netflix is giving its video subscribers a way to share their views privately. Netflix is hoping that the addition of this discreet method will encourage more users to link up their Facebook profiles and trust it a bit more. What users will see starting tomorrow is a menu of friends "culled from Facebook will appear after Netflix subscribers finish watching a video if they have turned on the sharing feature." From there, you can choose exactly what group (or what person) you want to share with.


This will make it easier to share suggested flicks with a subset of people. For example, if you catch a great comedy, you may know a few knuckleheads who would enjoy it. Rather than blasting it out to your entire network, you'll soon be able to direct the share right to those people (and those people alone). It's a subtle tweak, but it speaks volumes about how Netflix is paying attention to its subscriber base. We suspect that other networks will follow suit soon. While it's harmful in a sense to not spread Netflix shares as far as possible, the truth is that Netflix may end up with more shares to small subsets now that this change is in order.