I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.

They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.

The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.

Enter Joost.

Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.

1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.

2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.

3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.

Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us - the users - that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.

I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.

Scene 1

JD, looking nervously at the janitor:

 - Hey man, how’s it going?

The Janitor, on a ladder fixing a light-bulb, looking down at JD:

 - I’m 37 years old. I’m a janitor. How do you think it’s going?

With many other TV-shows, they get really good season 2 and can last to maybe season 3-4, when all the characters have found their jargon. With Scrubs it’s almost the other way around. Season one is a total blast. I’m laughing out loud.

First of all, let me say that I like social communities and I’ve been a proponent of it for a long time. Back in the 80’s when I was around 12-14 years old I used to call Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my 300/300 baud modem - yes that’s correct 300 bits/s - connected to my Commodore 64 and doing basically the same thing that drives people to Facebook and other social networks; communicating with friends.

My problem is not with the idea of Facebook but with the implementation of it.

Facebook will crumble and be replaced by other communities in the future for a couple of reasons, one of which is spelled FBML. That’s the reason Textpattern was succeeded by Wordpress and if you don’t know what Textpattern is, you’ve more than proved my point.

Much like Textpattern - which had equal market share with Wordpress a little over a year ago - Facebook decided to go with its own Meta Language. That rarely sits well with developers. Spending time learning something that is likely to be a fad is not something that anyone likes to do. You do it because you have to. You do it because there’s no alternative.

Now there’s an alternative.

OpenSocial by Google is about to be launched, and if it has the hallmarks of any other Google product, it’s likely to be good. Very good.

OpenSocial is an API in standard code that hooks into a variety of social networks i.e. you will be able to re-use your already existing PHP code and not tweak it half as much as when writing your Facebook apps.

There are other reasons that Facebook eventually will fade away, such as the fact that it has no original idea behind it (easy to switch to another network more close to home, whenever such network becomes available), and that it’s gone totally overboard already with media coverage, which is usually the tell tale sign that something’s passed its peak.

No matter how many other reasons, I believe the main reason is the fact that grass roots will leave it whenever a viable option becomes available to spread cool apps and get to show the world how great you are using standard code languages. That time is approaching fast.

I’ve been developing a couple of websites now and thought I’d share some of the observations I made along the way. Feel free to state your opinion as well.

First of all, I’ve never ever seen the meta tag “keywords” ever matter. Never. The “Description” tag matters, in the sense that Google will pick it up to describe what the page or the website you have published is all about.

When you have a couple of ad-based websites, you can easily get obsessive over how to best drive quality traffic to them. By quality traffic I mean visits from people that was actually looking for what you had to say or the products you sell/services you offer. In pursuing this, we’ve all come to realize the importance of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag, and of course the off site elements; the quality back-links. The latter being the most important of all.

Anyways, in all of this I have played around with changing/tweaking the keyword meta tag but it has never given me any visible benefits. On the other hand, it has never given me any grief either so for most of the sites I manage, I keep them there. Nice and clean.

Except for this site. This site has no meta keywords, and if you got here via Google or some other search engine looking for information on what to do with your meta keyword tags, then all the better. It proves my point.

I’d be more than happy to hear from anyone who have had similar or opposite experiences in this area.

Someone said to me the other day that in order to keep your blog alive and interesting, you need to update it six times a day! Wow. How about that?
Obviously someone who does that is either paid to write or very new at blogging (when things are new and shiny, you tend to wanna spend more time with that than anything else).

Anyway, I updated PurposeGames the other night and I’m so far very happy with the result. Sure, some bugs here and there but all in all I think it adds to the fun of the site and I find myself spending more time there myself also, which is always a good sign in software - being your own most enthusiastic user.

I stumbled across Seth Godin’s blog on the net and from there to his speech from 2003(!) which I almost dissed without bothering to watch it since it’s more than 20 web years since it was made. Classic mistake.

Watching it, it starts out like a regular “Now I’m gonna tell you all you’ve learned so far in life is wrong”-speeches that comes in 13 on the dozen at these type of conferences. But it didn’t take that path. I was very amused and amazed and above all reminded of some of the truths that I subscribe to. Also, he’s a good speaker.

If I ever get to the place where I’m looking for a marketer that talks and walks like me, I’ll be sure to use Seth Godin. There Seth, is the buzz about you spread by me, thus proving your point in the presentation!

From time to time, especially in the software and publishing business, you come across near absolute truths, one of which happens to be “Content always beats format”. The reason this is so easy to believe in is because it’s so easy to prove. A nice looking website which is never updated will always lose out to a relatively ugly website with its content updated often. That was easy and convincing enough, right?

More than a few times I’ve come across the wrong deductions from it, like my proof of its accuracy above. People tend to put too little emphasize in making their creations look nice, pursuing only the content or ”functionality” (if we’re talking about software applications). On more than many occations I’ve come across people that have made this really great application or web publication but fail to get any attention to it from having poor design advocating “first make it work, then make it beautiful”.

Much like a sad person won’t become any happier - long term - if he gets a lot money to spend, it’s really more pleasant to cry in a Rolls Royce than in your old Volkswagen, the same rule applies to web- and software applications. It won’t become a better application just by having it look pretty, but at the same time it certainly doesn’t hurt it to be presentable.

Having made an update to one of my projects of late - www.purposegames.com - it didn’t ad any new functionality (which it very much needs) but it’s become a better web app and web site from my update of its design. Also, it gives me peace of mind to start focusing on bringing some requested functionality to it, now that I’m happy with its presentation.

All in all, I think format doesn’t beat content, nor vice versa. Without one of these components a publication and/or application will fail with the broad public. Inevitably. You can quote me on that.

Whenever I have a cold - which nowadays isn’t that often - I find myself doing two things; first I curse modern medicine for not having found a cure to the simplest of deceases diseases one would think. Second, I pity myself and start dreaming of all the things I’ll do as soon as I’m well again.

So my days right now are filled with a lot of TV. It’s so boring also to not even have the strength or focus to develop something on one of my projects. SIDENOTE: Rowan Atkinson now on TV. He’s gone from being absolutely annoying as lead character in some TV-shows in the 80’s to now becoming a sidekick in made for TV movies such as the one on right now; maybe baby. Boring beyond belief.

A really cool thing though is Magnus Carlsen currently in runner-up position in Morelia-Linares. Chessbase has the latest on that of course. Go Magnus, Go!

Chess… Well, here’s a mystery for you. With the almighty internet being so big and wide with pages and sites on pretty much anything you’d think there’d be a chess site out there for those who are a little interested, such as myself. But no, there’s only ChessBase. Not that they’re bad or anything, it’s just so puny with one source only. I mean there must be at least 10,000,000 sites on gardening, one’d think there’d be at least a couple of sites on chess out there.