The Virtual Handshake

British broadcasting giant ITV announced Tuesday its intention to purchase alumni online networking site Friends Reunited for $208 million.

Intriguingly, while there have been a number of recent acquisitions in the social networking space (in case you haven”t been keeping score, MySpace was recently purchased by News Corp, Dodgeball by Google, Tickle by Monster, and Flickr by Yahoo), most have been entirely in the web arena. The ITV-FriendsReunited deal is the first I know of by a TV-centered media company.

I expect it won”t be the last, as highly sticky web venues like social networking continues to erode attention from TV and other traditional media.