In celebration of its first year on the bittorrent market, Hulu introduced on Thursday its new social networking tools that will provide users interactive communication experience that will allow them to interact and share ideas to other people.
Called the Hulu Friends, this social platform has been integrated to the bittorrent’s massive collection of videos, allowing people to refer any of their favorite shows or clips to other users and watch these together.
The social feature allows users to invite their friends via email accounts including Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail or social accounts such as Facebook, Multiply, and MySpace.
One of the most notable features of Hulu Friends is the Newsfeed function that will allow users to broadcast shows or video clips they are watching to their friends. (This function works like Facebook’s “What’s on your mind” which is formerly known as “Status”.
According to a PC World report, some file-sharing sites have already tapped the social platform to lure potential customers. These include TV.com and Boxee which have been using social tools that provide more interactive communication between users.
Meanwhile, for those file-sharers who do not want to use the social platform, Hulu said this feature can be turned off by users if they would prefer to access only video contents.
According to international research firm Nielsen, Hulu has over 9.4 million unique visitors in February with nearly 310 million streams.
Today, there are more than 40,000 videos on Hulu’s site which makes this one of the biggest sites of shows and videos.
The company is a joint venture of News Corp. and NBC Universal and with funding by Providence Equity Partners.