Sometime just after Memorial Day you will see an important step towards the community of movie fans we are building at Netflix. And this is at the core:

Every person at Netflix is going to have a profile -- automatically created. We will automatically generate an anonymous nickname, and give you a nifty-but-generic avatar image. If you want to ignore it, that's fine. But if you are a reviewer, or want to create a "Custom List" or want to participate in Friends... you might want to upload your own avatar or change the nickname to something pithy.

Anyway, the really cool thing about all this is that "Similar to You" percentage. Friends users know it because we developed it for checking movie tastes between you and any of your Friends. Now we've extended it to compare you and anyone at Netflix.

This way, when you see reviews on movies, you can see at a glance if the reviewer has similar movie taste to you. Click on the avatar and you can look at the reviewers other reviews, their favorite movies, and other custom lists they've created. We think this will make movie discovery more interesting. Anyway, this is the central component to a series of changes we are making this summer. You'll notice similar (gradual) changes in the Friends area as well. It's one of our first steps here, but we're deeply interested in how it looks and feels for you.