Joost: All Over The Place, Want An Invite?

May 3rd, 2007

Last night, I spent some more time playing around with Joost. I wrote a review of Joost earlier, and still think it’s pretty slick, the only big problem being that there still isn’t enough content I’m interested in, although it’s getting better. Last night I checked out the Ren And Stimpy cartoons, some calm dude performing magic tricks, silent Charlie Chaplin films, and a National Geographic program on earthquakes.

I did notice that the longer I used Joost on my MacBook, it got slower, and I started getting errors saying videos weren’t available, finally during the earthquake show I was watching. This is relatively a minor thing, but the illusion of your computer being turned into a television is really hampered when the video craps out partway through. Maybe it was bandwidth issues.

But other than that, Joost is still fun and compelling. They have really built a great buzz using these beta invites — viral marketing. Their inital scarcity made them more desirable. Several blogs I read have been using Joost invites to promote their blogs, while users have been scouring the blogosphere looking for them, providing traffic.

By starting off with few invites and slowly opening it up to more and more, using blogs as distribution, you get a Technorati blogosphere chart that looks like this (in regards to the word “Joost”:

(The numbers on the left are mentions of the word “Joost” in blogs indexed by Technorati)

The end result is they’ll likely have a huge user base right out of the gate, collected emails, tons of mentions all over the blogosphere, and the sky’s the limit once some meaty content comes on board.

Essentially, Joost has partially solved the “chicken and egg” problem, a common stumbling block for any new service providing content to users:

• Users are reluctant to sign up for a new content distribution service if there isn’t any cool content.
• Content providers are reluctant to offer up their cool content to a new content distribution service if there aren’t any users.

Joost now has users. They can now go to all the big networks and say, look at all these people that have downloaded our software and are ready to check out cool content. So let us distribute yours! What are you waiting for?

Using viral marketing, Joost got tons of folks to sign up for a service that technically, has little content. I think that’s pretty freaking brilliant.

Note: If anybody wants a Joost invite, please comment on this post — and make sure to fill out the email address part (it’s only displayed to me, not publicly).