Tynan on Tech

Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC and Fox, turned one year old yesterday. And what a precocious rugrat it’s become.

To celebrate, Hulu announced it’s becoming more social, adding a feature called, appropriately enough, “Friends.” (No word whether Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Ross, et al will be making guest appearances, but don’t hold your breath.) This allows you to build your own little Hulu social network by importing contacts from Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail (though the MySpace and Yahoo imports weren’t working when I tried them this morning). You can recommend shows to your pals, see what they’ve been watching when they really should have been working, and vice versa.

Hulu is hardly the first to try something like this – online services like Joost and Veoh added social elements to their video fare years ago – but it’s the first from somebody with stuff you might actually want to watch. And I think it’s what Internet TV will be like from here on out.

I have to admit I was deeply cynical of Hulu when it was first announced (and deeply amused at the silly name). I thought any venture between two TV networks was doomed to fail for the same reasons other online ventures from big clumsy Hollywood mega-corporations have failed – obsessive control over a limited amount of content, heavy commercialization, and yet another kludgey video player to add to my growing collection. I was wrong on all counts. (Though I still think the name is silly.)

Hulu’s range of content is impressive…..

For the rest of this fascinating blog post, see my Culture Crash blog on Computerworld.

Tags: Facebook, Hulu, social networks, Video