The Social

Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of Hulu's public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies."

Also new: a sort of trends page with rankings of the most e-mailed, searched, and embedded videos, as well as editors favorites. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live is a huge hit, and the most-searched name on the site is "Palin."

On the less pleasant side of things, Hulu's one-year anniversary comes at a time when the site is dealing very publicly with the invariable old media-new media gulf: pressure from content owners caused the site to ax its support for buzzworthy video software maker Boxee earlier this month.

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. "While it's not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu's public RSS feeds."

Industry talks continue, the post continued. "While we don't come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point," Ronen wrote. "They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."

Note: Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen Hulu's Super Bowl ad.

Google's "don't be evil" motto has been the target of the occasional critic. Hulu, however, has declared in its hyped-up Super Bowl TV ad that it is evil--and it's not making any apologies.

The Web video hub, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., promised to "reveal its secret" in the Super Bowl ad created by agency Crispin Porter & Borgusky, which was running on NBC on Sunday evening. It was an important debut for Hulu, as many television audiences had likely never heard of it. Indeed, when I tried to watch the ad on the Web for the first time, Hulu's servers were overloaded, indicating server demand was high.

But eager nerds who were hoping for a big announcement of new content or a hardware tie-in were probably disappointed: the "secret" was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. We hope.

The ad, called "Alec in Huluwood," stars veteran actor Alec Baldwin, currently in the cast of the NBC show 30 Rock, narrating a 60-second spot that takes place in what appears to be an underground laboratory facility beneath the famed Hollywood sign.

"You know they say TV will rot your brain?" Baldwin asks as he descends in an elevator. "That's absurd. TV only softens the brain like a ripe banana. To take it all the way, we've created Hulu."

The thinking, per Baldwin's monologue, is that if there's loads and loads of TV content available on the Web, you can't possibly escape it ("I mean, what're you going to do? Turn off your TV and your computer?") And Hulu, he says, was created with sordid ulterior motives: "Once your brain is reduced to a cottage cheese-like mush, we'll scoop them out with a melon baller and gobble them right on up."

A tentacle slips out of Baldwin's suit jacket. "Because we're aliens, and that's how we roll."

Guess my "Hulu is people" theory wasn't that far off.

• Click here for more Super Bowl stories.

Yaaaay! Stephen Colbert on Hulu!

(Credit: Comedy Central)

This post was updated at 11:01 AM PT on Tuesday to clarify wording: television content from Viacom is almost exclusively handled by MTV Networks.

In an unexpected move, video site Hulu will be getting some political loudmouths just in time for the 2008 presidential election: Comedy Central's late-night personalities Jon Stewart of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report.

We had to check and make sure the press release wasn't a joke, but there are indeed full episodes from both programs available. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering Comedy Central parent company Viacom has not officially signed on to Hulu, which launched as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. and does not yet have any other major networks on board.

But on the other hand, MTV Networks, the Viacom division that encompasses Comedy Central, has made some distribution deals, and both Stewart and Colbert were already available on the Web in one form or another. And Viacom had already made select content available to Hulu rival Joost, but now that the Joost hype has faded completely, experimenting with Hulu's ad-supported distribution seems logical. Making the popular Comedy Central talk shows available could be the media conglomerate's way of dipping a toe in the water.

Additionally, later in June Hulu will start to add select programs from PBS: Nova, Carrier, Scientific American Frontiers, Wired Science, and potentially others.

This bring's Hulu's count of programming content partners up to more than 70.

Social-news company Loomia announced Wednesday that it has launched a new application called SeenThis, which connects news sites with social-networking sites so users can learn what their people on their friends' lists have been reading. Loomia's inaugural partners in SeenThis are The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com.

Like many other "recommendation engines," Loomia's technology can suggest content items to a reader based on what he or she has already viewed. SeenThis goes a step further by using social-networking sites' APIs--the one that the current content partners are using is Facebook--to gather what people on a reader's friends' list or within his or her regional, company, or school networks have been viewing on a partner site. So, for example, a WSJ.com reader might see that eight people from his Facebook friends list have read the latest doomsday story about the housing crisis, or that members of his alumni network on Facebook have been browsing the travel section.

CNET Networks will be using SeenThis on its business news properties: BNET, TechRepublic, and ZDNet. NBC Universal, meanwhile, will focus on video so that viewers can learn which NBC.com videos their social-networking contacts have been viewing.

Perhaps because of the brouhaha that surrounded Facebook's Beacon advertising program, Loomia has stressed that SeenThis is opt-in only. A Facebook user, for example, has to install the SeenThis application before it starts tracking habits on partner sites.

The release from Loomia on Wednesday hinted that SeenThis will expand to other social networks as time goes on.

NBC's Local Media Division has acquired LX Networks, a New York-based start-up that produces videos for the Web about high-end entertainment and culture centered around New York and Los Angeles. Financial terms were not disclosed.

It's not like we couldn't have seen this coming. NBC's New York affiliate, WNBC, has been broadcasting a limited number of LX.tv videos--namely its "OpenHouseNYC" real-estate series, and the "1st Look" restaurant and bar preview show--since last January.

LX's slick LX.tv "channel," founded in 2006 by former MTV executives Morgan Hertzan and Joseph Varet (it was originally known as Code.tv), features high-quality production and professional anchors--many of whom are MTV Networks veterans themselves. Geared toward young professionals with a taste for luxury and a good dose of social energy, recent LX.tv videos have featured interviews with the founders of the Zagat Survey, the growing "small plates" phenomenon at New York restaurants, and a tour of a new martial-arts studio.

With the acquisition, Hertzan's new title at NBC Local Media is now senior vice president and general manager; Varet will remain on board as a consultant.

This post was updated at 10:18 a.m. PST to add information about Bebo's plans for OpenSocial.

SAN FRANCISCO--When Bebo co-founder and CEO Michael Birch took the stage in a theater at the Metreon complex here to announce the social network's Open Application Platform, he made the eyebrow-raising claim that the new initiative was, "dare I say it, 100 percent compatible with the Facebook platform."

Bebo representatives had hinted at Facebook compatibility last month when the social network officially joined Google's OpenSocial initiative. The new platform officially goes live on Wednesday night. "There's a little bit of a land grab with social networks," Birch said on Wednesday morning, acknowledging that Bebo, which was founded in 2005, was late to the game.

Creating an application platform, he explained, had been part of Bebo's strategy for quite some time, but then Facebook launched its heavily hyped developer strategy--and that changed the landscape for Bebo. "That kind of changed our course a little bit because we don't want to launch another platform," Birch said. "It just becomes like a format war." Consequently, Bebo's platform uses compatible APIs and markup language so that Facebook applications can be easily converted.

When OpenSocial (which has yet to launch in full) is ready and stable, Birch said, Bebo will add those APIs to its developer arsenal, too. "OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform are clearly different platforms," he said, then added jokingly, "Our lazy development team said they couldn't do both at once."

About 40 developers and companies have created applications for Bebo's platform launch. Among them are NBC Universal, which has created two new applications for the Bebo platform, one based on the hit show The Office, and one for Astrology.com, part of the company's iVillage brand; movie-centric social-media company Flixster, which has created a version of its application for Bebo; and virtual world Gaia Online, which has created the "Gaia OMG" application so members can access the service through Bebo.

"We want the good quality applications to rise to the top," Birch said, demonstrating the ability of Bebo users to rate applications on a five-star scale. The home (or "canvas") pages for Bebo applications are a little more extensive than Facebook's, with custom "skins" that members can then opt to add to their own profile pages. "It is a full-blown profile," Birch explained.

Birch stressed that Bebo is a platform for media consumption in addition to socialization. "We're very much focused on self expression and on content and media," he explained. Indeed, earlier this year, Bebo launched its Open Media Platform so content creators could start a presence on the social network. The Open Application Platform, Birch said, will do for developers what Open Media did for media companies.

Pirates getting in the way of business? Let's form Voltron.

(Credit: TV Tokyo)

The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.

It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of the companies allegedly involved in the agreement went unanswered.

The most notable party absent from the group is Google, according to The Journal's Kevin Delaney. Apparently, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan had been in talks about joining but did not go through with it. Google is the parent company of YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site that had come under fire from media companies for making it easy to share copyrighted content.

Google recently announced an antipiracy technology initiative for YouTube.