March 20, 2010 by Jenny Sanderson
The unstoppable rise of social networking shows no signs of slowing down as yet another major corporation has seen the benefit of incorporating the ever-growing medium of communication into its service.
The BBC have this week announced that they have partnered up with Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to make their digital service more social. Why they would want to do that I have no idea, but having some sort of social networking feature on your website does seem to be the latest internet trend.
BBC director of future media and technology, Erik Huggers, explained that partnerships with Twitter, Bebo and Facebook had already been in place for a while, they have just been waiting for the launch of iPlayer 3.0 beta to incorporate it.
“We are close to launching the third version of the iPlayer in beta which will have many more social functions embedded within it,” said Mr Huggers. “People will be able to bring their Facebook friends onto the iPlayer so they can share what they are listening to or watching with each other more easily.”
This seems altogether a fairly unnecessary feature to add to what is fundamentally a means of watching television, do your friends honestly need to know what you are watching? And if they do then surely you could just do things the old fashioned way and tell them?
It seems a fairly long winded procedure too, in order for iPlayer users to integrate their social networking accounts onto the BBC site you first will need a BBC username and password to login. After this is complete you will then have to input the details of your Facebook, Twitter or Bebo account into the iPlayer. Once this is done you will be signed into iPlayer’s social networking tool so that you can see what your friends are sharing and watching in the oddly named “coloured puffs” that will be situated beneath the player.
It seems as though we will soon be living in an online world where we are never not connected to a social network and where our friends can see everything from what we watch to what we’re wearing, scary times ahead.
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