Yesterday saw Joost debut their web-only Flash offering five days ahead of schedule, not long after the news that CBS is to begin releasing full-length shows on YouTube. (Some vote of confidence, given that CBS is a Joost investor).
Up until now, Joost has only been accessible via a downloadable client
that delivered mainstream content on demand. The launch also heralds
increased social media capability, with the intention that Joost users
will be able to share their viewing activities with friends, as Staci D. Kramer at paidContent reports.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins over at Mashable
is a fan of the Joost concept, though he feels it lacked something in
its execution. He thinks the Flash launch means that "As it stands now,
Joost is set to blend in with all the other
competition on the web, competition that’s by no means thin and weak.
As I’ve said for years, the problem with digital video is that the veg-factor just isn’t there in most systems, and for those systems
where it does exist, it’s rather shoe-horned and antithetical to the
rest of the user experience."

Hopkins
laments Joost’s lost opportunity to transform the living room Internet
video viewing experience; instead of differentiating themselves from
the competition, this launch serves only to make Joost another Netflix,
Hulu and YouTube looky-likey. To trot out an old-but-truism, content is
king; Hopkins says Joost will need bring in many more content
partnerships similar to their recently announced Wizzard podcast deal to continue to compete with the likes of YouTube and Hulu.

Windows 7 puts the cat among the pedants (or Hasta la Vista)

What was Microsoft thinking? Don’t they know how important it is
for geeks to feel that their world makes sense, that there is a certain
order to things? Are they unaware that the single most important
cornerstone of the tech industry, the thing that makes it all work more
or less smoothly more or less most of the time is the geek’s
unflinching desire to do things in the right way?

Surely they could not have intended to stir up such a pedantic scuffle over the naming of their latest offering, Windows 7, when anyone who’s paid attention – like The Guardian‘s Jack Schofield
– knows that Windows Vista was version 6 of the operating system, and
that it’s unlikely that it will be so completely overhauled as to merit
a 1.0 increase. Schofield writes:
"Windows XP was only a 0.1 increase on Windows 2000, and that probably
had more changes than Windows 7 will bring. After all, the interesting
stuff will be how Windows 7 relates to Windows Live and Live Mesh — or
doesn’t."

TechCrunch‘s Jason Kincaid clarifies things:
"Microsoft is now in a hurry to push out its next operating system
after the generally dismal response to Vista. And so we’ve come to
Windows 7, which is apparently tied to the build numbers and not the actual releases.
The new naming scheme lends itself well to faster, more incremental
releases similar to what we’ve seen from Apple (about once every 18
months), but it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be
more bland."

Survey shocker: Social media users want businesses to play too

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes: "For
all the griping about intrusive internet ads, lame marketing campaigns,
and lousy customer service, you would think that the last thing users
would want is to have companies invading the platforms they use for
communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it
turns out, the opposite is true."

The stats speak for themselves.

Perez says:"These numbers could not be more clear: these consumers are practically begging for businesses to get involved in social media. If these numbers seem a little skewed it’s because the survey was
only given to social media users. They’re more likely to understand and
appreciate how social media operates. Where traditional advertising and
marketing campaigns broadcast messages one way (business to consumer),
social media encourages conversations. And these open dialogues are
exactly what today’s social media users desire and participate in
regularly."

- Basheera Khan