Watching TV with friends is a time-old tradition. But what if you don’t have any friends around and still want to have that TV-on-the-couch experience? A few months ago, Splashcast and Hulu hooked up to bring Hulu to social networks via applications on your Facebook or MySpace page. Tomorrow, Splashcast will officially announce new, more engaging features for these apps: they’re calling it Social TV.

In actual fact, Social TV has been quietly tested over the past two weeks; the central differentiating feature being something called ‘Chatter’. Chatter allows users and friends to talk about a show via microcomments (comments don’t update your Facebook status).

The cool thing is that this is not done in real-time, but instead any time you chatter, it is synced to the video. So if you watch The Simpsons and put in a comment 6 minutes into the show, future users will see that comment, even if they watch the episode the next day. It’s like a running commentary left by social network users. Splashcast claims that during the two week test-run, time spent in the apps increased 50%, showing that comments make videos much more engaging. Other social features include polls and ratings.

We don’t think TV will be replaced completely by these ‘watch with friends’ applications: sometimes you just want to kick back, relax, and passively consume a TV show. But it’s also clear that the web is enabling new forms of interaction around TV, and that can only be a good thing.

If you want to try the widgets, you can grab them on the Splashcast website.

Tags: facebook, hulu, myspace, social tv, splashcast

(Via Mashable!.)