Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at F8

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on stage at F8.

Writing in Business Week, film critic Roger Ebert sings the praises of the embattled Netflix — and not the spun-off discs-by-mail business now known as Quikster — noting that he doesn’t rent DVDs by mail anymore. Instead, Ebert streams movies on demand.

Ebert is one of the few users to take to the Internet to say something kind about Netflix. Somewhere around a million subscribers have abandoned the service after recent price increases. Customers who watch movies on their PCs complain that the streaming selection is spotty, and about to get worse with the departure of the Starz catalog. Independent-film advocates fret that Netflix is deliberately thinning the selection of non-mainstream titles.

But Ebert lauds the company for focusing on streaming. He goes so far as to suggest that readers buy stock in Netflix, which is currently trading at less than half (around $130) of its 52-week high (nearly $300).

Ebert’s not the only one who sees a big future in Netflix. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg brought Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on stage at his keynote for the F8 conference yesterday, where Facebook unveiled a broad-ranging new vision for social media. Simply put, Facebook wants to know more than ever before about your life — what you’re watching, what you’re listening to, what you’re reading. It’s going to manage that information with the help of “social apps” created by companies like Netflix, who have the power to keep track of which of your friends are catching up with Breaking Bad.

It can also keep track of which of your friends are watching, er, Naked Sins or another similarly prurient guilty pleasure, which helps explain why not everyone is going to want to enable sharing when it comes to something as personal as their Netflix queue. (As a matter of fact, because of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, Netflix viewing data won’t actually be available to Facebook users in the U.S.) But Facebook thinks social apps will create a whole new way for audiences to find content. The idea is that, if you see that one of your friends just watched the latest Lonely Island video from SNL on Hulu, you’re that much more likely to click through and watch it, just so you have one more thing to talk about with your buddy.

Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, came out on stage to argue that people become more likely to pay for music when they become more engaged with it through social media services, insisting, “This will give artists a fair deal.” Hastings suggested that social-media integration could help double his company’s rate of growth.

Will it work? Facebook engendered a tremendous backlash with much more minor changes to the page layout earlier this week. It’s hard to imagine how those people will react to the new Timeline model the company is rolling out for organizing your online identity. ZDNet’s Tom Foremski asks the big quesion: “What if people stop sharing?” Mashable is a little more blunt, wondering, “Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?”

Zuckerberg’s team is looking forward to a future where every little thing you do is fair game — the games on your phone, the books on your Kindle, and the movies on your Internet-connected TV. Even the recipes you cook. 30- and 40-somethings might feel denuded by having so much information made public about how they spend their days and nights. Still, today’s teenagers are increasingly used to living in public online, and that’s the generation of users that Zuckerberg, Hastings, and the rest of the media industry has its collective eye on.