SocialTimes.com

LivingSocial Adds TV via Hulu, Supports Facebook Connect Posted: 27 Jan 2009 03:35 PM PST LivingSocial, the social discovery tool for sharing your favorite media items, has just added a couple of new features that make its user experience a little better. For starters, LivingSocial has added TV to its growing categories for media sharing and recommendations, broadening your options further than just books (which LivingSocial started out with), dining, movies, music, beer and more. Yes, LivingSocial had a beer category before it had a TV category, but it may have been worth the wait. The use of a Hulu application allows you to view television episodes within a tiny pop-up, meaning you don’t have to navigate away from LivingSocial in order to see a particular episode. This may be highly encouraging for some users, as it allows them to watch an episode and offer their ratings and reviews immediately instead of LivingSocial having to rely on users that have already seen a particular show in order to offer their ratings and reviews. This feature really opens up the immediacy of on-demand media in relation to social recommendations, so hopefully this will relate to beneficial contributions for LivingSocial’s database. In regards to further spreading ratings, reviews and recommendations around the web and across mobile devices, LivingSocial already has a number of Facebook, Bebo and hi5 applications, as well as an iPhone application. But the other new feature LivingSocial is announcing today is the inclusion of Facebook Connect which makes it significantly easier to login and share information to your Facebook friends. For personal reasons I prefer simply using Facebook Connect, as the LivingSocial applications are all separate based on the category. But from a practical standpoint, LivingSocial is likely hopeful about the new Facebook Connect integration as it allows easier social content flow between the two sites. This was a major concern for LivingSocial after Facebook made changes to user profile formats resulting in a “placement predicament” for applications such as their own. In all, the recently funded LivingSocial is making some good feature updates that are clearly taking the user experience into consideration while also appearing to be good business moves for development and growth purposes, as LivingSocial is all about sharing, organizing and recommending media in a very social sense.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o Google, 20 W Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610