Baaack from the dead... though I am sure it will trickle to the second page again with no responses.
I just wanted to add my 2 cents here. So I learned about movielens through an academic paper I read about tagging or something, and tried it and then convinced Stephen to try it too. I think it gives me the best recommendations (though nextflix with probably improve now that it has profiles for multiple users). Since Stephen is comfortable borrowing things for us, I also like that it can recommend me movies that are not available to stream on Netflix. Since using it I have been watching a lot more movies, and a wider variety of movies, and almost all of the predictions have been close.
Also, you get to know that you are helping a university do research on recommender systems, tagging, and other important Information work.
If you want to friend me, I'm Papersatan there as well, though, I think the friend's feature leaves a lot to be desired. You can't look through all friend's rated movies for instance, but it does allow you to get a combined recommendation, which is nice. Steve and I have very different movie tastes, but the system can recommend a movie that we are both likley to rate high, which is something Netflix still can't do.