Ranting Kenya

They say that first impressions are what really matter. Joost is proving that second look doesn’t hurt either.

After my initial post on Joost, I went back to the program and dug a little deeper. There are a number of other excellent features. There’s some really slick plugins that you can overlay on top of the video.

The one that I really like is the “News Ticker”. It’s really just an rss feed display. It’s small and not distracting at all, to my surprise. Usually any sort of video overlay distracts me entirely. You can only view the plugins when you’re watching Joost in full-screen mode. That may be why I’m not distracted by it. It cycles through all the rss feeds one by one, and one entry at a time. You have to copy and paste the rss URL into the program manually, so the usability could be improved a bit. Nevertheless, the functionality is there.

It also has channel chat rooms that you can join as guest. It allows viewers of a channel to discuss topics while watching the video. A unique idea indeed. I wonder if future versions will have a feature more like a regular message board, so that comments can be viewed at a later time by other users. Maybe a most discussed link comes up first… digg-style?

You can also overlay a chat application that runs on either the jabber or gtalk network. Particularly handy if you want to talk to your friends but still watch tv. Basically an alternative to watching TV in bed with a laptop.

The more I watch it though, the more I would like to see more content. I’m sure once the service is up, and enough users are on board, finding new content won’t be as difficult. It is in the project road map to add content. Basically, I can’t wait.