This week Netflix released the next great thing to get you to rent more movies — use your friends. It’s an outstanding idea. Your friends invite you to their friends list (or you invite them), you accept and then you can see what your friends thought of movies they rented, their recent rentals, a list of their top movies and sucky ones. As you browse through your rental queue, little purple icons are displayed next to movies your friends have rated. I’ve already changed the order of my queue based on what a couple people have thought. It’s also interesting to note what movies your friends have missed or perhaps haven’t rated yet.

If Amazon would allow friend ratings for books, then I’d be set. I, for one, don’t trust those total strangers that give every book they read five stars. Or maybe this would work better on a local level? I wonder if there’s any chance my local library would do this for books. I would consider anything to prevent another wasted commute read on the likes of Digital Fortress.