Due to my past entries in the contest itself, i’m on the mailing list to receive notices and announcements for participants.  As of about 30 minutes ago, I received a general compliance email announcing that some participants have failed to comply with the Netflix Prize rules by creating multiple teams with an identical set of members.  According to the Netflix rules, any participants and all teams to which they belong may be suspended from participation in the contest and may be ineligible for the coveted one million dollar prize.

Sounds fair right?  So here is the rub.   On June 26, 2009 Team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” reached the 10% improvement over the Cinematch algorithm required to claim the million dollar prize.    According to the rules, once this goal is reached, all teams have 30 days to submit their final results to be considered for the prize.  The clock is ticking and the last day of the contest is July 26, 2009.   But…

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos is an amalgam of multiple teams that have collaborated to win the prize.  The current leaderboard for the list looks like someone was playing musical chairs with the team names including things like “Pragmatic Theory”, “BellKor in BigChaos”, “BigChaos”, “BellKor” and so on.

The leading team openly admits that they have collaborated to create a winning algorithm and it may well be that the prestige of beating Cinematch will be sufficient to satisfy their competitive spirits but it sure seems like Netflix is already prepping the world for the announcement that the winning team may be disqualified.

I realize the rules were published years ago and have been very clearly stated but I have to admit, this sure feels like bad sportsmanship to me in a game that Netflix created and could benefit from since, also according to the rules, they own the submissions and the algorithms used to generate them.

After a little research I found Tweetlater and in a short while, I was contributing to the problem myself. I realized that everyone on Twitter must know about Tweetlater and were already using it. Eventually I got to the point that I was only receiving spam for direct messages and many of the tweeps that I followed were just twitterbots. My twitter experience was really suffering. So recently, i’ve started cleaning up my friends list removing bots, blocking spammers, and overall just trying to clean up my account. But I still get the usually inane “OMG, thanks so much for following me! Now go to my blog at http://www.we-can-both-make-so-much-freaking-money-together.com.”

I understand the motivation. For those individuals, Twitter is about networking, keeping in contact with your industry, and ultimately generating business. I don’t fault them for doing it. I do it and most of you do it too. But on the receiving end I still should be able to control it and since most of the automated stuff is not useful to me anyway, I was looking for a way to control it. Thats when I found it. You can opt-out of direct messages from Tweetlater.

Here is how:

1. login to twitter and follow @OptMeOut.
2. wait until you get the email saying @OptMeOut was following you back.
3. send a DM to @OptMeOut with any message you like.
4. now optionally unfollow @OptMeOut so that you won’t appear in the list of @OptMeOut followers.
5. you will receive a confirmation of the fact that you are fully opted out.

Thats it! For the original article on the Tweetlater.com site visit Tweetlater.com/optout.