The daddy of catch up tv websites Hulu, celebrates 17 months on the web by getting socially networked.

Hulu has launched a new feature. Impressively called ‘Hulu Friends’ that brings elements of social networking to the internet tv website. Viewers are now able to chat to friends from Myspace, Facebook and invite contacts from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts to join you in viewing the latest shows online. Viewers can also share videos and leave comments using a newsfeed similar to Facebook. Hulu Friends can announce what they have viewed or are viewing.

The new social network features are similar to existing tv websites like Boxee and TV.com who already have these social features integrated within their websites.

Hulu which has managed to become the second most popular streaming TV website on the web, supplying around 309 million streams and 9.4 million unique visitors. YouTube boasted more than sixteen times that amount, around 5.1 billion streams and 88 million unique visitors.

Whilst it may be getting boring to many having social networking everywhere you go, it is an effective way to connect customers with a given product. And social networking works very well with watching TV and movies.

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