The past week has been a busy and exciting one for Joost. Last week, we announced more than 30 top brands from around the world as advertising partners. Today, ads from some of these ad launch partners will begin to play on Joost.

We're also adding exciting new programming from five content owners - Turner Broadcasting System, Sony Pictures Television, Hasbro, the NHL and SI. Beginning later this week, you'll begin to see shows from these providers on Joost - shows like "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "The Transformers," "G.I. Joe," "Starsky & Hutch," "Charlie's Angels" and "NewsRadio." We'll also have video shorts and interviews from SI's Swimsuit magazine photo shoots, with behind-the-scenes footage and full-length videos following later this month. Finally, for all you hockey fans out there, the NHL is coming to Joost. We'll begin with Vintage games this month; full-game replays and highlights will follow soon.

We've also made changes to the widgets you find in the My Joost area of the user interface. We've added the CNN RSS feed to the Joost "News Ticker." And in a very exciting update, as of today you'll be able to invite as many friends as you'd like to Joost. Now, when you visit the "Invite Friends" widget, you'll be able to share Joost with an unlimited number of friends, family, colleagues - or anyone else you know.

Stay tuned.

As you might have discovered already, we're having some problems with the central servers in Luxembourg... We've been flooded with demand, which is fabulous and ultimately will make the system stronger, but since it's unaccustomed to this level of usage it's stumbling a bit, whereas we'd like it to be sprinting. While we regret that some of our new and existing users aren't getting the experience they should right now, we're getting an incredible look at the system at work (and more importantly what's not working) so that we can reduce the likelihood of this happening again.

We'll post again when the issue is fixed.

Thanks for your patience...we're getting there.

Cheers,
Fredrik

Good news - we've been able to build a fix for our central servers. In addition to this fix, we are in the process of fortifying and upgrading our central systems. We'll be adding new servers in Luxembourg to manage the searches and channel listings by early next week.

We've also learned a lot about our system in the past couple of days, and more good news is that the P2P network is working well.

While we are in beta, there are bound to be some hiccups, but we are continuing to develop the system and are committed to success. We appreciate your patience and your help as we work to improve Joost.

We're glad to be able to announce a new version of Joost. You'll see that we've fixed some bugs since the last release, which should improve your experience. See the release notes for more information.

Hi everyone,

I'm standing in as release manager this week and I've also been shepherding some of the newest features to a release, so I thought I'd give a little introduction to the latest release. First thing to note is that it's primarily a maintenance release with a bunch of bug fixes, including some adjustments to advert insertion points, "hand- raisers" (small boxed ads), some small things in the P2P layer, and some updates to the chat widgets.

The main changes you may notice are in the area of Joost links and in the addition of a new Widget: "Blog This". Each video and channel in Joost now has a web page or "Joost Link", associated with it, so that, if you so wish, you can link, blog, tag or cross-reference these pages to talk about the videos or channels that they represent. The page itself checks if you have Joost installed and if you have, you can click on a link which will fire up the player. Or you can just drag the link into the player and it will play. Joost Links have been quietly working for a while in the background, but now they work with channels as well as video. You can get the Joost Link from the info button in the player and then copy it where you'd like.

You can also use the brand new "Blog This" widget to blog about the video you are watching straight to your own blog, which also sends the Joost Link as part of your blogpost.

On our new developer site you can find out more about Joost Links and also some general information about our forthcoming developer API for widgets.

Soon you will be able to create your own widgets and do all sorts of interesting things with those and Joost Links. In the meantime, we hope you like what we have here and that it improves Joost for you.

Let us know either way!

May is a huge month for the IndyCar Series, and it all culminates this Sunday at the Indy 500. By the numbers, 33 drivers will run 200 laps around a 2.5 mile track at speeds topping 220 miles per hour, in front of more than 300,000 people - making this the biggest live single-day sporting event in the world.

With that in mind, some of us headed down to Indianapolis this week to meet with our friends at IndyCar Series and IndyVision, and to meet other partners. I gave a short presentation and demo of Joost at the business update meeting, and then it was off to check out the pits and the garages.

For those of you who don't know, IndyVision, the multimedia arm of IndyCar Series, already has two channels on Joost, and is adding more programming very soon. IndyVision also has a racing team, Vision Racing, and four Vision drivers have qualified for Sunday's race.

So we walk out to the pits, and the first thing that catches our eye is below - the Joost Ethanol can. For the first time, all of the cars at the Indy 500 will be running on Ethanol - not only is this better for the environment, but the cars get a lot more gas mileage.

Then we head up to the edge of the track and watch a couple of cars zooming around - probably at a fraction of the speed they'll race on Sunday. From this angle, we caught sight of this:

We all thought that was pretty cool, but not quite as cool as this:

That's Brian and me with THE Joost car - the No. 2 car that Tomas Scheckter will drive on Sunday. There's another one that looks just like it, which they'll use for today's pit contest.

So this Sunday, tune into ABC at noon EDT and root for Tomas Scheckter in the No. 2 car (or the other Vision Racing drivers - Ed Carpenter, Davey Hamilton and A.J. Foyt IV).