I'm sure people have asked this before, but I wasn't around to see the answer, but...

After talking to quite a few ppl on the message board, I would love to browse through all their movie ratings. Is there a way to do this?

I can understand some people wanting their ratings to be private...but can their be a function in people's profiles that asks whether people want their ratings to be private or public?

Nope. MovieLens has always kept ratings are private.

We have been interested in exploring some aspect of this for years. It is just a matter of designing the right experiment to be able to publish results. I had a "buddy study" experiment, but couldn't get enough participants. There are other experiments in the works.

WikiLens allows public ratings (or private, if you prefer). That is another little project of mine. However, it is alpha (sort of a prototype), has a much smaller user community than MovieLens, hence fewer ratings, has a different style of recommender, etc. It's not a substitute for MovieLens, to be sure.

Dan
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WikiLens (alpha). Express yourself. Help others.