14 October
2008
Columbus touching a New World
Its known I guess that I work for Joost and recently I've been shepherding the delivery of the new Joost website, front end and middleware and this morning we delivered part 2 of the new website which includes the Flash player.
At Joost we're now bringing more of the social features that we started in a small way on the original desktop player (which still works its idiosyncratic magic by the way).
Those social features are most obviously about seeing what other people are watching and doing on the site but you can befriend people (which is kind of following them) and see what they watch and favourite.
A step beyond Friends is Groups which you can create and anyone can join. Groups aggregate the behaviour of their members and they form part of the social commentary on what those members do as you can add comments to the Group as well as on individual Shows.
All of the activities on the site can be subscribed to as RSS/Atom feeds so to see what it is that I've been watching recently subscribe to:
http://www.joost.com/api/events/get/simonl?fmt=atom
Oh and the reference to Columbus in the title of this is an obscure in joke, Monday was Columbus Day and the project name of the Website is an explorer, it wasn't Columbus though.
Posted by
theSliver at
11:54
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The Joost Juke box
One of the little gizmos we have on the new site is something called a Zapper, kind of like a remote control cum mini epg. Kind of...
Anyway, as I tend to watch a lot of the content we have (in a slightly not taking much notice kind of way I admit), I use the Random tab in the Zapper. At first it was just entirely random from the entire set of content we have and that was mostly good enough for me, I could pick and choose from a different list as to what to watch/listen to.
For a lot of people though its the music library we have that makes us different from the rest and now the Zapper lets you roll the dice (we really need a dice animation in there), and play Music or Film as well as the generic Shows, and if you want you can just randomise Jazz or Action Films if that's your thing.
So those of us that like running the music randomly all day (something we could do in the Desktop player), can now do the same using the web site.
Posted by
theSliver at
16:53
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17 October
2008
How not to have another recession?
Paul Graham makes a reasonable case (if only in his usual style of repeating the same point as if that alone will convince), that now is a good time for startups to start.
What does seem to be true is that when recessions begin the number of MBAs that are begun also increases. Given the cyclical nature of expansion and recession that we go through perhaps we would be well advised to find these incipient management mavens something else to do with their recessionary period. Like raise pigs or something.
Posted by
theSliver at
15:23
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