Joost Blog

In the real world one of the best way to find cool TV shows or discover new and exciting music is to ask your friends. My daily consumption of shows like The Onion, TED Talks or Coolhunting was started because friends brought these shows to my attention. However up to now, social tools for online video viewing have been few and far between. When you found something cool - you had to copy paste the url and email it to someone whom you think might like it. This is of course is not an optimal way of sharing viewing tips or creating social interaction/context around great content.

So at Joost we are working to change that. We are making new features that allow you find great content based on what your friends are watching and to make it easier for users to communicate to their buddies which shows they may like. A few of those are already on our site. You can go into your friend's JoostFeed and see what they have been watching and/or you can show people when you find something VERY funny by using our shout buttons (e.g. LOL'ing). We will continue to release these types of features as we strongly believe that the social side of online content exploration has been largely ignored.

We added a new feature today that allow you to get email alerts if your friends do something on our site that we think you might find interesting. (e.g write a comment or shout "WTF").
You can of course disable the notifications under your settings (or de-friend really annoying people :) if you start to get too many notifications from your friends. We are also teaming up with a number of social networks and online tools so you can share your viewing with your friends that way. So there you go; now I'll be off to find some cool stuff to watch - with a little help from my friends.

Henrik
See what I am watching on: http://www.joost.com/users/henrik

P.S. small tip of the day. To disable alerts – click on "settings" and then select "preferences". Select your preferences – and save them by clicking on "Change" The direct link is http://www.joost.com/users/ InsertYourJoostNameHere /preferences/
Another small tip is that you can go into stealth mode under the 'privacy' setting if you want to have friends - but don't want to broadcast your activity.