Yesterday I was thinking about

Yesterday I was thinking about all the revisions I am going to make to my site and one of them involves the great DVD rental service Netflix I’m building a separate area to capture my movie tastes. One of the smaller pieces of it involves docking my Netflix rental queue on the page. I wanted to let people in on what I plan to rent and watch. I’ve even toyed with the idea of letting people put things in my queue.

This is not an easy task, but it should be. I’m going to have to jury rig stuff to parse Netflix’s HTML and put it into an XML file. I also have to setup something that periodically downloads my Netflix queue. Now the way it should be done is that they expose some XML-RPC or SOAP interface. Do you think if I emailed Netflix and said “Hey I wrote this XML-RPC API for you, you should implement it” they would give me the time of day? I want the API to let me download my queue, add and remove titles from my queue, rate rented movies, get my ratings, and pull up title details about a movie.

I think it would be cool to be able to embed the Netflix “engine” in my site and to build the interface into it that I want to use. Or is this just a dumb, time waster of an idea?