Joost Beta 1.0

Created in 2007, some videos may not play

New Design
The major change to Joost Beta 1.0
is the redesign. The main screen still has the same components but these components have been given a new polished look, and shows Joost commitment to developing a great product.

Content vs Users
Joost has added alot of content in the last several weeks.
In the last several weeks I have been really looking into Youtube and what makes it tick. The real engine behind YouTube is it’s users.The user’s do amazing video work and are marketing gurus, for instance user LisaNova has 72,748 subscribers and just did a video mashup with Perez Hilton. I would rather watch LisaNova than another video I already saw on MTV, just check out “Affirmation Girl…The Date from Hell” and try not to laugh out loud. Also there is no way any content acquistions per month could possibly keep up with the amount of new content YouTube gets every hour.

Dynamic Application
Moving forward all my applications will have the ability to easily tap into user accounts on most web services. The first is YouTube, if you are a YouTube author and have uploaded videos than you simply enter “?author=username” or if you have never uploaded videos but have a favorites list, then you would enter
“?favorite=username”
or possibly you don’t have a YouTube account, you can still do a random search “?search=search term”. This simple feature allows users to view the application with their own videos,and not be tied into a closed system.

User Integration
Not only can you enter in the info into the address bar, but user integration is built into the application. The users are growing at an alarming rate as the system is self learning and grows as it is being used. The feedback from the community as far as feature recommnedations, embeddable player requests has been awesome.

Fullscreen Support
Joost has the ability to go fullscreen even on 30 inch monitors, the Flash version supports the same capability.

Widget Support
Joost made a major change to their widget windows, scaling them down and only making them normal size when you actually use them. I suppose this comes in anticipation of developers creating new widgets and users having too many on the stage at one time. I do not agree with this and the Flash widgets are always their normal size.

Right Click Support
Several weeks ago Joost did not support right click functionality, the Flash version has several more options and has supported this functionality for several months..

New Explore Menu
After the new design I believe the next major overhaul is the “explore” menu. This is so far superior to the previous menu system and is definitely a step in the right direction, as content grows the scalability of it will be tested. The flash version supports this functionality and has eliminated the old style menu.

Drag and Drop Support
Joost now supports the ability to drag and drop videos into a container which can be made into a custom channel. I am very interested to see if most users will get it and actually use this really cool feature. The flash version supports this feature.

Zoom Capability
The explore menu allows users the ability to zoom in and out the thumbnails. The flash version also has this functionality but does it in realtime without having to reload the thumbs everytime the slider is dragged.

Old Design
Joost Beta 1.0 still has the old design in several major parts of the application, the new design is far superior, so seeing two distinct styles in the same application is odd.
The flash version has removed the old menu system entirely.