As you know, Social media is seeping into new facets of our life literally every day. In fact it has walked into your living room, without you probably noticing it. Right on your HDTV screen! Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and a gamut of other popular applications are available on your TV screens for a combined social experience where you are not only watching your favorite TV program, or Internet video but also staying connected with friends, family and contacts at the same time.

Even more impressive is the multiple number of ways Internet-Connected TV is becoming a reality. Interested parties include Internet majors like Yahoo, Consumer Electronic (CE) manufacturers that build TV sets, social and web apps like Facebook, Twitter and Blip.tv, content providers like Disney and NetFlix and lately service providers like Verizon. And with open development platforms the day is not far off when your customers can watch the Keynote of the your next User conference event sitting right where they are – on their couch! So it’s time for B2B marketers to take note too.

Now for some delving into the details of how all this is happening.

Yahoo’s TV Widget was launched in partnership with CE leaders - Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2009. This built upon earlier collaboration between Yahoo and Intel to build a Connected TV architecture. Wondering what’s a TV Widget?  It’s basically a gateway on your TV screen to Internet-supplied content in a certain subject area (usually at the bottom or to the side of your screen). All TVs with Yahoo Widgets can connect to the Internet, and via that connection can populate the widgets with real-time information and updates. At launch, as this review from CNET’s Crave posting reveals -  Yahoo supported only four Widgets – all Yahoo apps – News, Weather, Finance and Flickr. Fastforward to mid-2009 and now Yahoo’s TV widget offers Facebook and Twitter (read the latest CNET Review ) experience on your TV with plans for NetFlix, ShowTime and host of others. The key is that, right from launch, the development platform is open and can be used by 3rd party developers and content providers to build and launch their own widgets.

Separately, CE manufacturers like LG and Toshiba are also doing their own deals bringing new content on to their screens. For example LG now provides access to the more than 12,000 streamable movies in the NetFlix library right from the TV screen with their top end HDTV models. Both companies also offer access to multimedia content from connected PCs providing a seamless experience across the two screens.

And finally if you are still thinking that connecting your TV to the Internet is old hat since you are already doing so through your Xbox 360, Tivo, Playstation, Apple TV or other gadgets (or even a simple HDMI cable to your laptop) - there’s more. In an announcement this week Verizon announced that their FiOS IPTV customers will now be able to access Facebook and Twitter and right on their TV screens. And in-context! Which means that you can view what other people, or, your friends and family are saying about the very program that you are watching! Granted that the functionality is still limited in some areas – as this hands-on review from ReadWriteWeb bears out.  However, this certainly portends the socially interactive nature of TV experience in the future.

And with MobileTV already on its way - its not inconceivable to think that your Webex presentation will be watched across any of the three screens with real-time conversations and collaboration among your audience. More about the impact of all this on B2B marketing and IT management (somebody’s got to ensure all this works to provide a quality experience after all) in our next post.

- Ronnie