This afternoon I was quite chuffed to discover that I’d been selected for a Joost beta invite. Joost is, in a nutshell, TV for the web . Kind of the opposite to that Current TV channel on Virgin Media. I’ve been playing with it this evening, mainly perusing the XL-Recordings and gaming channels.It all seems very good – a good seelction of channels (for me) straight off, with the ability to search Joost’s catalog of channels and add more to your collection. The interface (see shots below) is pretty swish and the advertising between shows (The maximum I endured was 2 * 10 second clips) does not detract from the channel content too much. Presumeably these are targeted advertisements, though it didn’t seem so from the few I watched. There is also the ability to interact in channels and a widget interface. I must point out that Joost is a legal service – I’m not in the business of pirating. It uses P2P (peer-to-peer), to distribute content to users – I had hardly any lags on my measly 2MB connection, although the full-screen content is compressed at quite a low bit rate.Apparently, the Mac version of joost works with the Apple remote, which I could see would make this a very pleasant experience. I think I’ll be playing with this toy a fair few more times this week.
Archive for category Applications
Joost Beta
Apr 12
UK Jobs in Web 2.0
Mar 12
If anyone else like me is considering working in the uk “web 2.0″ market, and finds the posts on common job boards clogged up with all the jobs from america, the small job board I have created and posted online might be a help. You’ll find it over at: http://webtyrant.com/jobs. It aggregates some common job boards together like 37Signals and ThinkVitamin, but removes anything but those located in the UK.
If anyone would like to contribute to allow me to attend the Future of Web Apps or the Future of Web Design conferences over the next few months, I’d put together some independent reviews of the events on this site. As the funds of a lowly research student are not all that much cop, you can donate some funds using the donation page.At the moment, registration for Web Apps is £195 + VAT (£595 + VAT including workshops), and Web Design is £59 +VAT.
I heard about fakeyourspace via mashable today, which offers the ability to purchase your own social networking friends to leave messages and comments on communities such as myspace and facebook (the only two web pages I ever see to be open when supervising university labs). In their own words:“If you are tired of seeing everyone else with the hottest friends and want some hotties of your own, then this is the place for you.”For the princely sum of $1.99 – or $0.99 as an introductory offer, you can purchase a friend to leave you two comments on your profile per week. The photo’s seem to all rather fake, as their name would suggest.I would give you some more stats, but it seems that fakeyourspace is either suffering from the mashable effect (being mashed?), or indeed that its been pulled for being completely and utterly ridiculous. I wouldn’t be surprised if myspace or facebook had been on their backs in order to cut the kind of fake networking that such a system would introduce. They could easily kill each of the profiles which had been created on any of their networks if not.
Registration is open for the Future of Web Apps conference in London 07. I’d love to go, loads of great companies/people talking (good to see Last.fm making an appearance), loads of schmoozing (if thats the appropriate word), but unfortunately absolutely jack to do with my PhD, so no funding.
I was thinking about this earlier and was trying to make an educated answer. What I would note is that it is primarily content which drives users to use sites, we can see that through all manner of feeds and low bandwidth sites across the net. Without content, theres no point in sticking up a website. You can see demonstrations of that assertion here from time to time. It’s also fairly visible through all manner of seedy content on the web as users will be quite happy to sit through the many pop-ups and poorly formatted text to get to that bunch of images which they’re after.Design ends up just being the icing on the cake for users, but for other (perhaps) more hardcore users such as any number of programmers, it can be an ultimate turn off to see the horrendous environment which content which we thought we might be interested in is displayed.I think the reason I’ve been pondering this is the huge amount of extremely popular social networking sites which I’ve accessed which just don’t seem to abide by the rules which those of us who have been programming on the web have become accustomed to adhering to. I am of course referring to web standards and their apparent lack of appearance at myspace. They’ve recently risen to light (as if they ever went away) as myspace have been in talks with O2 about the possibilities of accessing pages via mobile. How can they get away by flouting design rules? Have we been lied to? Should we never have bothered? It’s kind of a joke that an application so recently on the scene is so buggy.I for one feel accomplished at the end of the day knowing that whatever I’ve produced is beautiful code (or at least my best attempt at it). It’s going to work well, and hopefully for a long time if standards are adhered to by browsers in the future too. It doesn’t need other applications to make it navigable either. Despite all its buggy pages though, myspace must be good at something, right? It’s not just all for the kids? It’s allowed people and artists to listen to full tracks by one another and browse for similar music via those peoples friends. Oh what? – That’s it?A recent perusal through a free music mag “salvo” from my local fopp shows that out of the 10 up-and-coming artists listed, none are without a myspace page, and none offer any other point of contact. It’s kinda nice when communication is provided like this to those who want/need it, but for my part I’d much prefer if they had a wordpress blog sat on their own domain, or at least used wordpress.com.
Carson Systems is showing the details of how dropsend stacks up in terms of monthly profit. Ryan states that at a conservative estimate by December ‘07, it’ll be making $21k/mo. He also seems to be beating off a bit of bad feedback on the advertising which has/hasn’t been done.