JoostTeam

OnTheToob.com, the best companion web site of Joost got acquired by none other than Joost.

Hal Schechner, the master mind behind OnTheToob, just got hired by Joost and his personal site project was acquired at the same time.

Hal will be starting to work for Joost tomorrow on September 4th 2007.

I was hoping to ask Hal a few questions regarding his past, present and future involvement with Joost but it is hard to get a hold of Hal (he is a busy man).

A bit of history:

So until some of those questions can be answered directly I will give you some details I was able to get from Hal during some of our chat sessions.

Hal as been involved with Joost since last April. He wanted to find out more information about new programs and channels added/removed by Joost. Unfortunately the information was not easily available.

So one night Hal and I where chatting in the Joost IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #joost-dev) and within minutes he had turned a URL based search query into a full fledged Web front-end and flat files back-end.

A few days later Hal was working with a prototype database back-end and RSS feed generator that was able to give you by the hour changes within Joost programs list. At that point some Joost employee where starting to notice Hal work. They where in fact using his RSS feed to keep track of what was added to Joost own program database.

OnTheToob was the next step in Hal’s mind to provide the information in a useful way to other Joost users.

The rapid development of OnTheToob was made possible due to Hal deep knowledge of Python. With Python Hal has been able to turn ideas into concrete Web results within minutes.

The future of OnTheToob:

At this point in time it is not clear what will become of OnTheToob.com. There are a few possibilities.

1. OnTheToob could be maintained as a separate site beside Joost and be maintained as is.

2. The most plausible possibility is that OnTheToob will be rolled-up as new features in an enhanced version of Joost web site. This should mean a better user interface and faster information availability since Hal will have direct access to Joost content database.

Hal involvement at Joost:

So what will Hal do at Joost you ask? I am not to clear on that. Apparently it will have something to do with application development (that was an easy one)! Hal will most likely be involved with user community development around Joost API. After all, Hal was the first successful user community Joost developer.

Hal will also be able to work from home with occasional trips overseas, and trips to NY.

Hal can be contacted at: feedback@onthetoob.com

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