Introducing Joost Widgets

Joost blends the best of television with the best of the Internet. Widgets are one of the key areas where our viewers experience this mix. Built from simple, powerful, and standardized Web technologies, Widgets are independently developed software components that run in the Joost software. Widgets can be used to provide fun, games, facts, and community features alongside television content. A widget can be as simple as a Web page, or as complex as any traditional application. Unlike traditional Web pages and software applications, it lives inside your television.

What's a Widget?

A Joost Widget is a bundle of information that provides Joost viewers with a new facility of some kind, extending and enriching their TV experience. Some examples we made ourselves include a news-ticker, chat and rating tools, and an alarm clock. Widgets can be selected, enabled, and updated from within Joost. They may be stand-alone, or depend upon externally provided sites and services (for example bookmarking services, data services).

The Joost Widget framework combines stylish user interface facilities with sophisticated data storage, access, and manipulation tools. Data can be stored locally or on the Web, and widgets can be given access to information about the current program being viewed, as well as interact with viewers via mouse, keyboard, or their remote control.

Web developers will feel instantly at home in the world of Joost widgets: at their simplest, widgets are essentially Web pages packaged to run "inside the television". There are no huge development toolkits to download, no massive APIs to learn before you can see any result. If you can make a Web site, you can make a Joost Widget - our hands-on tutorial will show you how.

Underlying Technology

We've built the Joost Widget platform on top of the latest Web standards, powered by the Mozilla browser engine. Developers who are familiar with technologies such as HTML, XML, CSS, SVG, Ajax, Javascript and RDF will find an exciting new environment to develop their ideas, and a full-featured software infrastructure that will allow them to focus their energy and intelligence on making television more engaging, social and connected.

We've kept to a minimum the number of new technologies needed to create Joost Widgets. Joost is developing a simple XML-based mechanism, the Joost Widget Language (JWL, "Jewel") for defining the user interface elements (buttons, menus, etc.) you see on-screen. This provides some consistency of user-experience while allowing the Widget's content to be created in HTML and SVG. The initial release of the Widgets system will focus on support for these existing Web languages; JWL support will be added later.

Widget software is written in standard Javascript, but may also connect with remote Web services, creating the potential for sophisticated "thin-client" applications that connect our next-generation TV environment with externally hosted software systems. We've worked hard so that you don't have to, and we'll continue refining and improving the Widget development environment in response to community feedback and emerging standards.

Privacy

The use of third-party widgets is completely under user control. Widget authors are responsible for complying with Joost's API Terms of Use, and declaring and honouring their privacy policies. Like Web pages, Joost widgets are published in a simple, open and inspectable file-format. If you're planning to make commercial use of the Joost Widget API, please let us know first.

Context and Community

In the days when there were only a handful of channels, it was easy to know what to watch. Now, with a seemingly infinite choice, Joost Widgets introduce a new way of dealing with the information overload of modern life. Through Widgets, you can share the best (and worst!) of today's television with your friends, tagging, blogging, linking, reviewing, recommending to your heart's content. Through our community mechanisms, you'll be able to select whose opinions and comments show up on your TV screen while you watch, stay in touch with old friends, and make new ones. Best of all, the technical infrastructure for these services is open and extensible, so you're limited only by your imaginations.

Widgets don't live in isolation; they're situated in a rich data environment, and will have access to the ever-growing catalogue of Joost content. Since viewers can create user profile and community data, Widgets provide the perfect way of soliciting user-generated recommendations, reviews, comments and other annotations. Widgets provide a creative framework for helping users find the content on the platform that best suits them. Since each video has an associated Web page, a "Joost link", these can be easily blogged, bookmarked and linked to. We envisage many creative uses of this data, providing alternative ways to navigate through the thousands of hours of Joost content.