I think Hulu and Boxee might be very clever!

hapa:

… and not “clever” in the purely flattering British sense… I’m starting to wonder whether Hulu and Boxee are really duping us here.

Now, OBVIOUSLY Hulu will be back up and running on Boxee very soon.  I mean, how could Hulu be sooo stupid as to so blatantly disenfranchise their users?  …particularly, the key influencer set… tech savy, early adoptor, tweeting, blogging, word-of-mouth generators.

So while we’re looking forward to the end of our little interruption in service, consider this:

On their own, Hulu and Boxee, both, were mainly in early-adoptor-zone (EAZ).  You could argue that Hulu after the Superbowl ad, was trying to cross the cha…. (egh… just can’t say it).  Anyway.  In a classic example of “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,” when embroiled in a little geek-news drama, you get an ignition effect that helps get both Boxee and Hulu’s individual stories out to a larger audience.

See for yourself, take a look at Google Trends for February (Hulu in red, Boxee in blue), and the YTD running chart below.

The recent press coverage has Hulu’s news references exceeding the lead up to the Super Bowl, and we’ll see if the search volume gets a bigger uptick than it has so far… though it is noticable, but not dramatic.

Even better is the blog trends chart (Hulu in blue, Boxee in red) from Technorati:

Clearly the largest beneficiery has been Boxee.  They have more news reference and blog mentions than they have had in their history, and their search index is only modestly lower than during their “soft” launch late last Fall and when they were name dropping with Netflix and Joost in what very well could have been a paid press campaign (not sure).

That they’re the good-guy in this melee, it leads me to think that they will let it run its course and continue to benefit from the chatter.  I love Boxee, and much of their value is in the social networking aspects… so getting more eyeballs (and one would hope, users) like this is a stroke of cunning genius, or amazing luck.

Now, how long do we have to wait for Hulu to make their big magnanamous move and finally side with their users???