When Hulu was first announced, the reaction of some critics was: ‘oh, no! Not another YouTube wannabe!.’ But here we are, one year later, and Hulu proved to be anything but disappointing. And to properly mark this anniversary, Hulu has also announced that the website will become more social.

The new feature, called Hulu friends, is exactly what is sounds to be: a social networking feature that will allow users to share their Hulu activities with their friends. They will be able to check out what their friends are watching, and exchange notes.

To start with, Hulu has integrated Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Facebook and MySpace to make it easier for friends to be found. This way, users will be able to see which contacts are already on Hulu, and which aren’t.

Hulu will now help people stay connected, share videos, leave messages on their profiles, leave reminders for self to broadcast videos to friends, and even post videos on sites like Digg, MySpace, Facebook or Delicious. All users need to do is start up an account, and start searching for their friends on Hulu.

Internet videos are by far one of the most popular online activities today, and social networking has become a worldwide phenomenon. Combining the two should result in something good, just by looking at Hulu’s success over the past year.

Hulu still has a long way to go before reaching the popularity of YouTube, but the last year was a proof that anything is possible. An online video service with social networking features sounds like a winner to me.