Hulu Could Bring The Social Graph to Millions
Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.
Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.
Hulu's addition of our social networking contacts, their profile information and in some cases their activities, collectively referred to as the "social graph," is important for a number of reasons. There is so much user data available online and so much network effect left untapped that this kind of move seems like a no-brainer to us.
It's notable as well that Hulu didn't build its own social network from scratch. That would have been a waste of resources. Instead it is leveraging already established social networks elsewhere.
The most important consequence of the announcement may be that the OAuth protocol used to securely access social networking data without requesting a user's password is now being placed in front of millions more people than it has been before. That's good news.
Concerns About Hulu Friends
On the other hand, it's sad that the OpenID community remains small enough to be left out in the cold by Hulu. In theory the site should be able to add an OpenID login button to its list and pull in standard Friend of a Friend data from any identity provider at all.
Barb Dybwad at Obsessable wonders whether Hulu Friends is actually a reason for Hulu to be less "friendly" with other social video platforms that want to play Hulu content in their communities - specifically Boxee.
Finally, we're concerned that Hulu Friends isn't being featured very prominently on the site. It takes a few too many clicks to get to the friend syncing page on Hulu. We're not seeing Hulu activity pushed out to social network activity streams, either. In fact, it looks like Hulu is using the legacy Facebook API, not the fancy new Facebook Connect. Is the company being overly cautious about Hulu Friends? If they are, its limited adoption could become a self fulfilling prophecy.
All in all, though, we feel positive about Hulu Friends. We hope the company innovates on top of the idea and makes more moves towards integration with the open web.
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This sounds great.. I am always sending links to my friends for Hulu pages.. This Should make it easier.
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If you find the Hulu Post interesting Watch This
Interesting development from Hulu. JanRain has a software as a service (SaaS) solution similar to this called RPX. RPX allows a user to login to any enabled site using his/her existing account from Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, AOL or Windows Live ID. Upon return visits, the login process is as simple as two-clicks, since RPX remembers the user's identity provider preference. RPX is great for web hosts too in that it provides a rich set of user profile data, allowing for some pretty cool social graphing on their site.
This type of technology really represents the future of online identity authentication. Increasingly, web surfers are demanding identity portability in favor of maintaining separate identities in silos and "walled gardens" across the internet.
Just to clarify my last comment, social graphing via Hulu Friends obviously requires the user to login with their Hulu account. The unique point of difference of RPX (http://rpxnow.com) is that it allows you to actually login with the aforementioned multiple third party accounts (Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID & AOL) and still enables social graphing features..
Hulu could probably entice more registrants by enabling logins from the major identity providers, rather than forcing users to remember another username/password combination.
According to the New York Times, Hulu, Internet broadcaster, is adding social “friending” to its service offer. However, they are going it alone. Using Open ID would allow Hulu to amass much larger audiences. Maybe Hulu will be the High Quality Internet Broadcaster that produces content for the Internet demographic synchronously. They certainly have the quality on an asynchronous basis. If so, and they leverage the log in features of some of the larger social networks they may be the next major Internet portal
I drew up an online petition to bring Hulu to Canada:
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/hulucanada/