Is Joost web 2.0 ?

The more I play with Joost, the more I like it. What strike me though is that they opted for technical choices that do not seem obvious those days, when everyone wants to move everything online:

• Joost a a desktop app and not a web app (it is about 17mb to download)
• Joost is not a social network site, although it uses social networks features
• Joost is not about User Generated Content but about Professionally Generated Content (see the announcement they just made about advertisers coming to the platform, everyone knows it will be almost impossible to bring big advertisers to UGC platforms)

Is this the beginning of a new trend ?

Comments

[Mathieu Nouzareth]

Dan

I agree with you and I think not going full web might be a good thing after all. The most successful services are not always the one going along with the trends.

I think social networks will become just features in the near future and Joost is a very good example of that. BTW, you can read what Om Malik had to say about cafe.com (our new service) a few weeks ago: http://gigaom.com/2007/02/05/are-social-networks-just-a-feature/

[Dan Brickley]

Joost is Web 3.14159265 ;)

Re "Joost is not about User Generated Content", ... well... I guess I consider viewer-created metacontent (ratings, labels/tags, subtitles etc.) a particularly interesting kind of content. And Joost is growing into a rather nice platform in that area. Brief example for now: each piece of content has a Web page to go with it, which provides a hook into the blogging/tagging/linking world of the Web, even if the Joost experience is full-screen desktop app based.