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Matt was kind enough to send me an invite to Joost today, so I figured the least I could do was check it out and write about it. (please don’t ask for invites, I don’t have any to give out)

If you aren’t familiar with Joost, it’s the new project of Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis. If you think those names sound familiar it’s because they do. Niklas and Janus are the same guys who made Kazaa and Skype.

So what is Joost? Joost is like Internet TV. You download the client (it’s very small, mine used less memory than my currently open Fire Fox!) and then using a bit torrent like system you can can watch TV on your computer. It’s not live TV but it does offer some cool channels.

There’s a comedy central channel, a fight channel, and a soccer channel.

Best of all, it even has Moose and Squirrel!!

If you look at the above image, you’ll get a good idea at what the Joost interface is like. While I love the service, I feel that the interface could use some more work.

In my opinion, the interface is a little clumsy. Sure it’s neat the way it overlays, but it doesn’t respond like I’d like it too. I had to click pause about 3 times before it finally paused, and once I got stuck in full screen mode and was unable to make the controls come back up.

Another annoying feature is when the playback catches up to the download – it gets choppy. The first thing I could think of was realplayer. Of course, as more people get on Joost I expect that this should resolve itself.

The channel selection is another area that could use some work. Take a look:

It took me a while to realize that the middle element is always highlighted – not the one that I’m hovering over. Ordinarily that’s not a problem, but if I click on a non-highlighted channel it loads – without any real notifcation to me that it’s doing so.

Is it annoying enough to get me to stop using it? No! I’d just prefer a more windows media player feel to the application.

It’s definitely a neat concept though, and I’m going to waste lots of time exploring it over the coming weeks.

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