In conjunction with a celebration of its one-year public launch anniversary, popular TV and movie streaming site Hulu today launched a social networking component. Users of Facebook, Myspace or other social networking sites will find the featureset familiar: public user profiles, friend lists, activity streams, notifications and lightweight messaging. We went to check out the new features with our first primary concern being privacy; the good news is Hulu has a fairly atomic permissions structure in place. You can set 3 levels of privacy (public, friends-only or private) across all dimensions of your personal information (name, location, gender, birth date, birth year, email, interests) and your activity stream (notes, your queue, subscriptions and site activity).

As is typical of most social networking services, you can invite your friends from other networks (Facebook and Myspace) or your email contacts lists (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail). Your profile interests in favorite TV and movies are linked to Hulu searches, and logged activities include watching content, adding items to your queue or subscriptions, rating items and adding friends. We found the system seemed to have a few minutes of lag time associated with friend adding and receiving notifications about friend-related messages which could be first-day jitters waiting to be ironed out, but overall the new featureset seemed straightforward and easy to use.

The social networking addition brings NBC and News Corporation's Hulu up to par with its two main competitors in the IPTV space, Joost and CBS's TV.com, both of whom provide similar levels of user profiling and activity streaming. The new tools seem like an intelligent value-add to an already great service; if I'm going to participate in a site over time, why not allow me to accrete identity and activity information and make it easier to share my favorite bits with the folks I know? It makes the site feel stickier, and that's a very good thing for Hulu.

Perhaps the new feature rollout sheds some light on why Hulu isn't trying harder to go to bat against those pesky "content providers" who reportedly are to blame for pulling the service from the excellent social media center application Boxee recently. The popularity of Boxee further cements the shift from media consumption as a passive activity to a socialized pasttime; what we watch (or listen to) and like, we want to share with our friends. It's possible that Hulu and/or its content partners wanted to try and keep that social activity "in house" instead of "letting" it happen on Boxee. If indeed that idea played some role in the Hulu/Boxee kerfuffle, I hope Hulu and providers will come to their senses, take some lessons from web 2.0 and focus on being a platform that embraces the distributed nature of conversation, rather than a destination that tries vainly to capture it.

 

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