Right in time for its first anniversary, video site Hulu has announced that it is dipping its toe into social networking. Similar to competitors CBS-owned TV.com, Joost and Sling.com, the NBC Universal and News Corp. joint venture is rolling out a feature its calling ‘Hulu Friends’ whereby users can create profiles and, optionally, share their viewing activity with other members of the site. Contacts/friend-lists can be imported from both Facebook and MySpace, along with popular web-based email services, such as GMail.
The upside for Hulu, presuming they can persuade users to join yet-another-social network: As paidContent notes, “the direct sharing of video preferences and content within Hulu will make it much more easy to track what individuals are watching and hence, make them more targetable for ads.”
