Read over at TechCrunch today that Joost has undergone a UI makeover to become an all-flash site. Don’t know how that is going to give the ailing site a boost, but good to see that Joost is still alive. They have a great idea; using P2P to deliver streaming video. but I could never get myself to use it. I was one of the early adopters to try the desktop client. It was nice to use with lot of good features but I can’t see myself using keyboard and a mouse to interact with my TV. I am too addicted to my media center for that.

In early days, one of the most common feature request on the Joost support forums was for a media center plug-in for Joost. I am surprised that they never made one. However cool media center is, it still lacks a killer app that delivers non-TV content to TVs. TVTonic, my most favorite app on MCE, does that job to some extent but still all it does is to aggregate a bunch of video rss feeds. Joost had all that plus had a social aspect to it. Given the proliferation of Vista Ultimate and XP MCE, such a plug-in would have provided a nice install base for the fledgling software. A good install base would have given a much needed network effect to Joost particularly given that it’s USP was P2P streaming + social. I’d have loved to use Joost from my Media Center but alas that never happened.

I really wish MCE provides a platform to broadcast ad supported media over the internet to our TVs. There are a lot of such sites (Hulu, YouTube) that have a such content and I wish I could watch them on my media center sometime. Having some social features that would allow viewing what my family/friends are watching and sending them recommendations/reminders about shows/events right from the MCE UI would be awesome too. First preview of Windows 7 is just round the corner and I have high hopes.