"Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with the merest tap of a 'friends' key on your remote control. The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in real-time - whether they be watching live television or something stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple - you could enter letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends' contact lists," writes Tom Coates on his blog at Plasticbag.org.
"Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed."
You can download the core part of the material as a PDF file, Social Software for Set-Top Boxes.
Comment: People with Microsoft Media Center PCs already have instant messaging and other internet features on their TV sets and it's dead easy to add a webcam, so it would be interesting to hear if some are using them for TV-related social networking. The Linux crowd is also developing something similar with MythTV.
