Netflix has announced that it is ready to dive into the world of social media by integrating with the ever growing networking site Facebook.

In the filing with SEC of its earnings report, Netflix revealed, we're working on an extensive Facebook integration, which will further the notion of a personal Netflix account.

This evolution from household to personal relationship will take several years, and there will always be some households that only have one account. With this shift, we are starting internally to think of our available market as the number of active mobile phones in a territory, rather than the number of households, because that is the number of people who have the means to subscribe to a service like ours, it added.

The Netflix-Facebook integration doesn't come as groundbreaking news especially after the recent development in December 2010, when Netflix said it was recruiting 'Facebook Integration Engineer'. However, the Los Gatos-based company's move to foray into social media has several implications and consequences.

For Netflix: Reach and Advancement

The Facebook integration announcement has already left the observers discussing how Netflix is evolving and trying to spread across various platforms.

Listing another business opportunity in its SEC filing, the company also said, we are starting internally to think of our available market as the number of active mobile phones in a territory, rather than the number of households, because that is the number of people who have the means to subscribe to a service like ours.

The company has already entered the app business with apps for iPhone and Windows phone. In November 2010, the company also announced that apps for Android devices were coming up.

Besides this, the company also said in its report that it was reaping the benefits of the growth in the use of connected devices with Windows and Mac laptops, Sony PS3, Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo Wii named as the most popular devices for watching instantly from Netflix.

For Users: Social movie-viewing experience

The Netflix-Facebook integration would mean the most to the users of both these services. The Netflix viewing experience would be enhanced on a more social level, such as the option to Like a movie and share it with your friends.
Sharing Instant Queues, recommending movies and being able to track what your friends have watched would be among the many possibilities.

Netflix could also chose to add the exclusive perk that XBox 360 version enjoys to Facebook. The Party Play mode, which allows users to watch Netflix movie at the same time as friends, could be introduced on the social network.

It can be recalled that this is not Netflix's first experiment with social networking. It had flirted with the idea of having its own friend system in the past. However, the company dropped the service in March 2010 citing that it was not as popular as the company hoped it would be as only two percent of the subscribers used it. However, the friend system did stay on for six years.

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