I've been subscribed to some Netflix RSS feeds for about a week now. Overall, it's not bad but I had to scale back what I was pulling into FeedDemon.
I started with my queue, my recommendations, the Top 100, and the New
Releases. The latter two are public feeds for everyone, while the two
former feeds are specific to my account. My feelings on them have been:
Queue
-- I've found this to be pointless and removed it from FD. RSS is great
when I want to be notified that some content somewhere has changed. But
when Michelle and I are the only ones changing that content (the queue itself), I don't see much point. Ditto for the "Recent Rental Activity" feed.
Recommendations
-- This one is useful in that it puts some titles in front of me that I
might no otherwise find. Overall, I find Netflix's recommendations
engine to not be as accurate for me as Amazon's or the Suggestions
engine in Tivo. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that Netflix
often recommends films that simply have the same actors/actresses as
movies I've recently rated. If I'm a DeNiro or Coppola fan, chances are
pretty good I already know about their movies...
Top 100
-- This one isn't bad either. It hasn't changed much and I'm not sure
how often they recalculate their Top 100, but it's interesting to know
what's getting a lot of requests.
New Releases
-- I had to unsubscribe from this feed. Amazon's "New Releases" for
DVDs (and Music, for that matter) highlights the new stuff that's
likely to be of interest to many people. You can then drill down
further to see the more obscure releases. The problem with this feed is
that it's just a firehose of new releases. Bizarre documentaries,
how-to and self-improvement titles, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like
independent movies and some of the non-mainstream stuff... but when I'm
reading my news in FD, I don't want to sift through 50-60 new titles
every day on the off chance that I'll find one or two that seem
interesting.
