After your overwhelming response a few weeks ago about keeping your Friends from seeing those pesky embarrassing titles (something with Teletubbies comes to mind, or it could be that lowbrow drive in classic...) we wondered whether there was anything we could do in the short-term to ease the suffering. Every time we had started working on the right implementation in the past, it seemed like the project got tabled for something more pressing. But today your trusty web engineer Mikey showed me that he had built a quick-n-dirty version of Movie Privacy. It's not pretty, but i have to admit, it does the trick.

So, in a rather unNetflix-like way, we're just going to release it to Friends users in the next week or so. Let's see if this finally allows you to connect to folks you know slightly less well (or maybe too well), and for whom you absolutely needed the ability to hide some titles. We've all read your comments and suggestions for how best to implement this. Trust me: this isn't that. It's not that we're not hearing your suggestions, it's just i was interested in getting this in front of you quickly. So here's how it will work:

In the Friends area, look at the second navigation bar; along with the usual "Invite Friends" and links to this blog, we've added RSS FEEDS (per our earlier conversation) and MOVIE PRIVACY. The Movie Privacy page couldn't be much simpler. It provides a list of all the movies you've rented or have in your Queue (or At Home), all in alphabetical order, and for each movie, you have the option to make it private. That's it. Click "private" and its invisible to any Friend. Does it help? I think it's a start.

PS: It will not, at first, list your RATED movies. Just RENTED and in QUEUE. Let's see how this goes. ALSO: The more movies you've seen or have in your queue, the longer this page will take to load up -- so please be patient. It could take 10-15 seconds perhaps for you power-users. PPS: RSS Feeds are not currently filtered for Private Movies.