For the “cyber nomad” (cyber-cafe frequenter), Jooce is a new web-based venture which aims to give:
- Multi-network-chat – instant message your friends from your jooce desktop, no matter which IM client they use
- Instant file share – share files instantly with your friends just by dragging and dropping
- YouTube upload – upload your favourite YouTube videos to your jooce desktop and share them instantly with friends
- Public desktop – express yourself with your fully customizable public face on the internet
- Media Player – play music, watch videos, create playlists;
- File Storage – secure online storage of all your files – accessible from any internet connection anywhere in the world.
This reminds me somewhat of Wallop, a kind of MySpace evolved. It’s probably important to remember that you or I might not be the target audience for this sort of thing. Generation Y (and later) eats up the sorts of features on offer by the bucket-load, and the not-so-tech-savvy of all ages could perhaps enjoy the way it brings together a lot of functionality into one manageable entity. Geeks like myself might prefer to use other disperate services that are potentially harder to use but offer extra functionality or features, and this can make it easy to pick holes in these sorts of things, but in reality I think there’s a lot to be said for this sort of thing. For one, having your music collection online (ignoring the issue of DRM for a second) would mean that you can hotdesk or visit a friend and not worry about where it lives. It’s one for the “coffee shop generation” perhaps.
An interesting feature of Jooce is the split between public and private “desktops”, where you can organise your content and publish it or keep it secret by dragging it between the two. The duality of public/private personas when online is something I spoke about in my recent presentation “Touching the Future”. I think it’s something that people growing up with the internet now will have to learn early on in their development, so Jooce’s implementation helps to make this easy, making it very clear what you are publishing about yourself.
It will be interesting to see how successful Jooce is, one thing is for sure, giving people methods for hacking in extra functionality (Facebook), and building in transparency (linking/searching), is something that bolsters any social network. It’s something that is traditionally harder to achieve in all-Flash affairs, but with good APIs it is definitely achieveable. Let’s hope these concepts are core to Jooce.
I have 8 Jooce invites to give away, first come first served…