As you may know, the BBC’s IPTV “watch again” service is called the iPlayer, and today a new version of the software went live, now incorporating social networking.  It’s now possible for users to create their own public profile, and link to other “friends” that have profiles.  More than this, you can interconnect with the indispensable Twitter and Facebook, whereupon iPlayer cross-checks which friends there also use iPlayer.  Now this isn’t the first time that this has been tried with IPTV: for example Boxee has “friends” and recommendations, and I saw the other day that Apple’s iTunes now has a social networking component called Ping.  However, iPlayer sees 5 million users per week (according to one of today’s press releases), which makes them a potentially very large ready-made social network.

This could be an interesting new way to interact with your friends, for example sharing TV recommendations, or sharing your TV viewing history with a group of people.   There’s so much channel choice on TV these days that the “communal viewing” experience we had 20 years ago is now largely gone, perhaps except for the reality shows like “Big Brother” and “Idol”.  Some of these shows have been enjoying storms of Twitter messages as the fans share their thoughts live as the show goes on.  Bewildering shows like Lost and Heroes attract huge amounts of discussion and commentary on various internet bulletin boards and social networks.  People want to share and exchange views, to discuss and argue, so it seems to me that what the BBC are doing with iPlayer is quite smart.

This is a little glimpse of the future: we can expect the collision of TV and social networking, not only as TV moves to IPTV, but also as the TV becomes more like a internet-connected computer, and the mobile becomes a TV viewer as well as a communications device.